Lainey Wilson will release her fifth studio album, Whirlwind, on Friday—13 years after she arrived in Music City with nothing but her camper trailer and her dreams.
“I’m getting to share a side of me that I didn’t even know existed,” Wilson said of Whirlwind. “I’m writing about love –not mushy gushy kind of love, though. Y’all ain’t ever going to hear that from me. I’m like, ‘I love you, but I can do my own thing.’”
She celebrated Whirlwind with Spotify and 150 of her biggest Nashville-area fans this week during a private event dubbed Whirlwind Market. Spotify claimed a portion of Nashville’s Farmers’ Market and set up vendors with goods that mimic Wilson’s songs. There were flowers and honey for guests, along with Louisiana cooking, a hair braiding station, and photo ops.
“The Whirlwind Market, that’s got a little ring to it, right,” Wilson told fans after she bounded onto the stage with her acoustic guitar and a support player. “It feels nice out here. It feels like fall. I can get used to this.”
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Wilson promised fans that Whirlwind would take them on a journey and said that she was getting to know herself right along with them.
“You’re going to hear some more sense of humor in there,” she said, telling fans she couldn’t wait to hear their thoughts on the album. “Hopefully, it gives you that same peace and comfort that it brought me when I was writing and recording it. It brought me home during a time in my life where I was nowhere near it.”
Wilson performed three songs from Whirlwind: “Hang Tight Honey,” “4x4xU,” and the title track, marking the first time she had performed them for a live audience.
Lainey Wilson Got Her a Man Worth Writing About
“This right here was exactly how the song was written, just me and a guitar,” Wilson said of Whirlwind. She wrote the song with the same people she penned “Heart Like a Truck” with, Dallas Wilson and Trannie Anderson. “Sometimes they know what I’m trying to say better than I do.”
Wilson explained that “Whirlwind” was a super simple song when they wrote it. However, Jay Joyce produced the song, and her band played on it, giving it a different life.
She wrote “4x4xU” about trying to escape the whirlwind her life has become.
“I realized that the only few things that keep my feet on the ground are keeping my people close and doing all the things that make me feel like that inner child,” she said. “Putting my feet in the dirt, going for a drive, and I finally got me a good man, and he’s worth writing about. His name is Duck. As soon as I thought I couldn’t get anymore redneck, I did.”
Four days before the album’s release, Wilson told fans she was “starting to get those nerves.”
“I feel like I’m about to have a baby or something,” she said. “I’ve never had one, but if I had to guess, it’s just like, ‘How did this happen?’”
Lainey Wilson Feels Like She’s “About to Have a Baby”
The singer explained she’d been working on Whirlwind since before her last album came out. She said she’d spent the previous two years traveling the world and meeting different types of people from various walks of life.
“I have realized through all of that that we’re all actually a lot more alike than you think,” she said. “I’ve learned so much, and I feel like I kind of get to view the world from a zoomed-out perspective.”
She’s positive Whirlwind is the best album she’s made.
“If it never wins a dang thing, I still know it’s the best stuff that we’ve ever done,” Wilson said, reminding fans her band played the album. “These are the boys that I’ve been traveling around with for years. “They are all influenced and inspired by different types of music: punk, blues, jazz rock. You hear a little bit of everything, and it is fun for me because they’re my best friends, and I can hear little pieces of them in it.”
She released her breakthrough hit “Things a Man Oughta Know” in 2020. Since then, Wilson has won two Grammy Awards, was named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music, and appeared in Yellowstone.
“(Life has) been changing every single day,” she said. “I feel like my life has changed, but I haven’t.”
Getty Images for Spotify
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