Lainey Wilson receives a new album nomination and six CMA nominations

• You might say that Lainey Wilson is having her big moment right now with a highly anticipated album dropping on Friday and six CMA nominations — the most of any artist this year — waiting in the wings.
• The 13 brand-new songs Wilson co-wrote are filled to the brim with her spirit, an alluring blend of grit and sass, vulnerability and resiliency.
• Nearly half of the songs are straightforward “identification” songs.

You might say that Lainey Wilson is having her big moment right now with a highly anticipated album dropping on Friday and six CMA nominations — the most of any artist this year — waiting in the wings. However, she has recently experienced many significant milestones.

Two ACM awards, a future recurring part on one of TV’s biggest blockbusters, the title of top new country singer according to Billboard, the desired slot on Luke Combs’ tour lineup, CMT breakout artist of the year, and her own headline tour are just a few of her accomplishments. Who is capable of managing it all? Wilson may not be included.

“You know, I figured plenty of opportunities were gonna come my way just throughout my career,” she tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t know that once I really got my feet up off the ground, it was gonna be this many opportunities and look like this.”

The 30-year-old Louisiana native has been stumbling around Nashville for the better part of a decade, and she is now figuring out how to fit in as the country’s newest star. She is doing this with the sweet satisfaction of knowing she is making her splash totally on her own terms.

The colorful clothing with her signature bell bottoms, the half-cane syrup, half-cayenne Looz-Esque drawl, and the self-penned music that abundantly pours from both her own rural roots and country’s wellspring sources are what you get.

“The best part of all this is that I feel like I have been able to stay true to who I am — and stay true to what made me and my raisin’,” says Wilson (who probably has never been fully acquainted with the “g” at the end of “ing”). “I would truly hate to wake up 20 years down the road and be like, dang, I did all this stuff, but I was not me while I was doing it.”

Every song on her new album Bell Bottom Country, which is an exciting follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2021 debut album Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’ and is currently nominated for a CMA Award, reflects her unwavering spirit. The 13 brand-new songs Wilson co-wrote are filled to the brim with her spirit, an alluring blend of grit and sass, vulnerability and resiliency. The lyrics introduce a woman who survives off “them letters written in crimson red” but also has a “neon side… sitting like a devil on my shoulder.” Nearly half of the songs are straightforward “identification” songs.

Wilson clearly wants her listeners to be fully aware of who she is.

“I think it comes from, for the longest time, people not taking me seriously,” she reflects. “I truly do. I think it was those seven years of being in Nashville and I mean, I even had a song that Luke Combs cut that we wrote together. It didn’t matter. I still could not get a publishing deal to save my damn life. I had a lot of folks thinking that the way that I talk is not really the way that I talk. And I’m like, well, you oughta talk to my momma and my daddy and my sister and my granny.”

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