Lainey Wilson Is the Childless Cat Lady Country Needs
It’s true that despite the headline above, I have never seen country singer-songwriter Lainey Wilson posing with a feline. But who can resist putting the boot into the determinedly pubescent twerp that is J.D. Vance? His stupidly mocking phrase, as echoed up top, has become encoded as a meme that translates to “how tone-deaf can a Republican be?”
And, of course, in this historical moment when all human life revolves around Taylor Swift, there’s a particular resonance to the phrase. Tay-Tay finally put her glittering thumb on the scale of electoral politics using the barb as her signoff on last night’s Instagram post declaring fealty to the Harris-Walz ticket. (Oh, benighted MAGA `strategists’– what brain fart made you taunt her into the open, with her 283 million IG followers, by putting up a deep fake on Truth Social implying that she was on your squad?)
It came complete with a fetching actual photo of Taylor, 34, not with her (solidly liberal) tight end boyfriend Travis Kelce but with her also fetching kitty, Benjamin Button.
Before embarking on a depiction of Wilson’s recent, expertly delivered show and Q&A at the Grammy Museum’s rooftop venue in Los Angeles, let’s just note that yes, Taylor is different from all others. She sits atop the revenge-ditties genre, even though overlapped topic-wise with other neighbors like Olivia and Billie, as a simple matter of vast scale. Which amplifies the idiocy of Trump’s prediction the morning after the debate that her stand will cause her to “pay a price in the marketplace” (never mind the 8+-million IG followers who liked it overnight).
Enough politics. Let's, rather than wring our hands over Trump’s seeming invulnerability to bad press and to his poopy-pants debate performance, turn to consider the steady rise of Wilson in the public eye, as she embarks on a tour of twenty-some (largely red-hued) markets on the late-summer amphitheater circuit.
The boxes she’s checked tote up as such arrivals at the top rank usually do—the current tour of mid-size venues that sell out quickly (e.g., her Greek Theater show early this month), the popular single from new album “Whirlwind” dropping to much acclaim as the collection pops up on the charts (immediate placement at No. 8 on the Billboard all-genre long-play roster), the chat shows like Jimmy Fallon hustling to put her on their air. Her guest spots and song performances on the wildly popular "Yellowstone" have led to her being cast again for the episode tranche coming in November.
The Taylor/Lainey comparisons do carry some heft. Lainey’s boyfriend Devlin “Duck” Hodges tried for a pro career after throwing for then-record numbers in college football, catching on with the Steelers in 2019--but after chucking four picks in a Sunday Night Game against the Bills, never really won a pro spot and turned to real estate. (He can out-shoot even Tim Walz, having won the 2018 Alabama State Duck Calling Championship—a dynastic credit that led to endorsement deals for camo gear and mallard-hen duck calls.)
Wilson walks, or shakes a limber leg to, a very deftly modulated line between tradition (she had us at hello with her accent from rural northeastern Louisiana) and her originality (which burbles out of her in a reliably charming way). As she proved in her Grammy Museum session with podcaster/journalist Allison Hagendorf, it’s all mixed in with a keen in intelligence she undercuts with offbeat verbal zingers, some of them self- targeting. Never precious, she roller-girls around various musical genres with her crack band and has the likable trait of including her road dogs on her album sessions, rather than hiring the Nashville studio cats who would be familiar to her after thirteen years of scuffling as a songwriter around Music Row.
If Taylor is musically Miss Americana, Lainey is Ms. Kitchen Sink. Which brings us to her work on “Whirlwind” with formerly punk-inclined multi-instrumentalist Jay Joyce, whose work with Eric Church helped him refurbish a Baptist church into a studio in rising destination East Nashville. “All anyone wants to be, even in country music, is a rock star,” said The Ringer after a visit, “This guy will get someone there the fastest, and the trip will be the strangest.”
From the old-school-sweet duet with mentor Miranda Lambert (“Good Horses”), through the banging “Hang Tight Honey,” freshets of innovative sound structures abound as the overall effort enforces the claim, “Country’s Cool Again.” For which Lainey owns a good deal of credit—she’s the first hands-down new female star since Maren Morris came on the scene in 2016. Miranda, Dolly, Reba, Wynonna and others have welcomed her into the pack– and the Grand Ole Opry. (Not to mention radio ubiquity and the Stones inviting her to sing “Dead Flowers” with Mick in Chicago after she opened for them in June.)
Scroll down in this post to see Wynonna and Lainey rock Tom Petty's "Refugee":
Fred Schruers
Stting onstage for her interview in the breezy rooftop Ray Charles Terrace before a sell-out crowd of 350-plus, she was chatty and unflappable even as some idiot noisily hot-rodded a muscle car five floors below on Figueroa Street. “Sounds like a pissed off bumblebee,” opined Wilson on her way to numerous insights:
On working with her road band in Joyce’s studio:
“We were working on this record before [predecessor] “Bell Bottom Country” even came out, and my band got to play on this record. So it's just really fun for us to be able to feel like we created this stuff together, and to be able to do it together on stage is pretty magical.”
On the lessons of success:
“I feel like I'm kind of stepping into what what I have been called to do. And I feel like every single song I write, every single song I get to put out, I'm finding who I am a little bit more, and the more of my fans that I meet, I feel like I learned something about myself that I that I didn't even know.”
On the friendship and collaborations with Lambert:
I’ve always had a weird sense of peace about knowing that I was going to be doing this. I would never tell her, so y'all don't tell her. But I had a picture of her in my bedroom that– I was like, she don't know it, but we friends. I guess I need to tell her that, it's too late now for her to run.”
On keeping her songwriting fresh:
"I would consider myself a songwriter before I consider myself an artist, because I've been in Nashville for 13 years…before I had a record deal, I was trying to write songs for other artists. And so I know. I can tell a story, and that's the foot that I have, always led with.
"With this batch of music, I felt like it was really important for me to kind of pull back the layers [of]--what have I already said? What kind of stories do I want to share that maybe I haven't shared before, or what's something about myself that I've learned in the past two years since “Bell Bottom Country,” that I'd like for my friends to know? And I really wrote it down. I mean, I was like, okay, well, I'm in love. Let me talk about that. It's fun to write love songs and mean it.”
On refining her workflow:
"I’d normally write 200, 300 songs to get the top 12 or 14 and as my career has has grown and changed over the past couple years, I realized that there's only so many hours in the day, and I don't have time; but I did have time to sit down and get focused and figure out, okay, what am I saying? What do I want to be singing for the rest of my life?"
On stepping into a work partnership with Jay Joyce:
"Before I met him, I had always said, I want to work with him, he just seems like a mad scientist. He's not scared to get a little weird, and he's not trying to be perfect, and I'm not either, and I think that's why we probably do work well together. A lot of people had told me, they said, Jay is terrifying, scary, he walks around in a black trench coat and lights cigarettes up on a toaster. And I'm like, that don't sound scary to me--that sounds like we'd be friends. That sounds like home.”
On persisting through the lean times with her values intact:
"I'm telling you, I would walk down Music Row and knock on people's doors just trying to get any opportunity I could, and I had doors slammed in my face--but that felt the most me. It felt the most real and authentic. And I felt, well, you know what, at least 30 years down the road, I'll be able to look back and say, `Well, I never was anything that I truly wasn't.”
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