Country music star Lainey Wilson recently spoke about how God called her to a career in music. Wilson spent over a decade trying to solidify her place in the country music industry, where she illustrated there was no “plan B.” She explained, “A lot of people thought I was crazy. ‘Yep, 19-year-old Lainey.’ I knew it. I did. I knew it. But there’s been a million steps.”
“You never had a plan B?” TODAY host Willie Geist asked. “I never did,” she affirmed. According to Wilson, she once told her parents when she was visiting Nashville on vacation that she knew it would be her home one day. “I told my parents in the car, I said, ‘This is home. I knew it,’” she recounted. “I knew I was going to be a part of the industry, and in a weird kind of way, I think they knew it, too.”
However, when she first arrived at The Music City, she spent three years living in a trailer, a far cry from the stardom she now enjoys as one of the most prominent figures in country music. However, she remained steadfast in her determination to hit it big in the country music capitol, an endeavor that would take more than a decade to fulfill.“When I first got there in my camper, you know, I didn’t know that it was going to take me another 10 to 11 years to even, like, crack the egg a little bit,” she said.
Moreover, Lainey explained how she believes music is her divine calling in life where God had bestowed the gift on her long ago. She further credited her ambition to her “hardheaded” roots, where she refused to give up. “I think God laid it on my heart a long time ago. I think it was being from a bunch of hardheaded folks,” she said. “You got to be a little bit nuts to want to do this. You do.”
In a separate interview with Fox News, Wilson emphasized how prior rejections only pushed her to continue pushing harder to reach her goals. It ultimately took the artist 13 years before she would finally hit it big in the music industry.
“I think a lot of the rejection really just kind of made me want it that much more,” she said to the outlet. “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. 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.”
“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’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?”
Featured image credit: Ben Childers, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lainey_Wilson_2020.jpg