Speaking in an interview with Fox News Digital, country music star Lainey Wilson, whose special “Lainey Wilson: Bell Bottom Country” will soon premier on Hulu, spoke about the challenges of the country music business and how God and hardheadedness helped her overcome the challenges of her early career, namely rejection and heartache.
Commenting on the rejection issue to Fox News Digital in her interview, Wilson commented on her hardheadedness and getting that from her family, saying, “I think a lot of the rejection really just kind of made me want it that much more. I am hardheaded. I really am, and if you could sit down and talk to my parents, you would realize why I am the way that I am.” She added, “Both of them, when they have their mind made up, that’s it. And I’ve had my mind made up from the very beginning that I was going to do this.”
Continuing, she added, speaking about how she has worked in Nashville for over a decade and managed to make it past much rejection, saying, “I didn’t know what it was going to look like, but I truly do think that that rejection and the time that it has taken me to get to this point, because, I mean, this year it’ll be 13 years that I’ve been in Nashville doing it.”
Building on that, she got to speaking about God, saying that she thinks the Lord wanted her to see more and live more before becoming a star so that she could share more stories with her platform. She said, “I think it’s really just a part of my story. And I think the Lord kind of wanted me to live a little bit more life so I could have more stories to tell, so I could relate to more people.”
She added that entertainers must think about for whom they are working, saying, “That’s what it’s about when you kind of zoom out and you think about all of this. It’s important to remember and realize, why are we doing this? And what are we doing this for?” She also said, “It’s just because we all want to feel something. And, I think, because of that rejection, I think people can relate to some of my stories.”
Then, speaking about what Nashville is like for those fighting to become singers, she said, “As a little girl, you think, ‘Oh, I want to move to Country Music City.’ And you think you’re gonna show up, and everybody there’s going to talk the way that you talk. And that’s just not the truth. Nashville is a big old melting pot, and that’s kind of when I realized, too, that, man, you don’t have to be from where I’m from to eat, sleep and breathe country music.”
Further, commenting on how her family’s experiences with being farmers for generations influenced her willingness to stick to things, saying, “I truly do think it is from being from a long line of farmers. I mean, on my mom’s side and my daddy’s side. They rolled their sleeves up. They got to work every single day and had good years and bad years, but at the end of the day, they loved it.”
She added, “So, that meant that they got up, and they did it again. And they’d fall down, and they’d do it again. They just had no other option. And my daddy has always tried to remind me that he worked really hard, but he’s not just working hard for himself. He’s working hard for me and my sister and my mama and my sister’s kids and, one day, my kids.”
Featured image credit: By Ben Childers – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110258488