Lainey Wilson on the ‘Yellowstone’ Finale, Her Friendship With Taylor Sheridan, and the Joy of Giant Bell-Bottom Jeans

How did you learn that you needed to market your art like that?

I learned that from being in Nashville for 13 years! I think it was all my time here. It was year seven when I signed a publishing deal. Year eight, I signed a record deal. You know how it is when you’re 16, you’re like, man, if I could just get a car but then you have it and you’re like, if I could just get a boyfriend, if I could just graduate college? I thought, if I could just get a song cut, if I could just get a publishing deal, if I could just get a record deal. Then you realize that, alright, you signed the dotted line. But that’s really when the work begins.

I knew that the kind of music that I write and do was not cool when I first got here. It just wasn’t. And just like fashion things go in style, things go out. But I knew still that I wanted to tell stories and I was like, okay, I think things are going to flip back around. I think there’s going to be a time, there’s going to be a need for this specific sound, and if I can just keep trucking along, hopefully I will find my audience. It’s been one team member at a time for me, it’s been one friendship at a time, one fan at a time, everything. It’s been just really starting from the ground up.

I’m so thankful for that because to tell you the truth, these past couple years have been so insane and my life has completely changed, but I still feel exactly the same. I’m so glad that I’ve been here a while and been around the block so things don’t feel as scary. And at the end of the day, you ask and you shall receive, and sometimes it comes tenfold, but a group of people that love me and care about me, we’re all on this journey together, and that’s a cool feeling.

Your newest album, Whirlwind, talks about feeling caught up in something really crazy! How did you capture that feeling in song?

It was during a time of my life that was constantly changing, and thank God I had songwriting, and I had these tools to where I could sit down and put my thoughts down. During a time in my life that just felt like it was going 90 to nothing, these were the things that just kind of reminded me who I was and why I started doing this in the first place. And as long as you can always go back to that and think back to that, it gets you through whatever it is that you’re going through to get you to the next thing.