UK fan favourite Lainey Wilson will release her debut record – Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’ – tomorrow. We spoke to Lainey ahead of the release to dive in a little deeper to the story behind the record – in the interview we dive into her latest single and what Jay Joyce has brought to the project. Pre-save the project here.
Hey!
Hi girlfriend! It’s so good to see you.
It’s so good to see you too, happy release week – we are finally here.
Girl, I can not believe it.
It’s been so many years building up to it and it must be almost hard to believe that it’s finally happening.
Yeah it doesn’t seem real honestly.
Congratulations, it is such a strong debut – the breadth of your songwriting has really come to fruition on this project – just how proud do you feel of it?
Thank you very much for that, I’m telling you – from top to bottom of this record – it’s who I am, what I want to say and how I want to say it, and I’m just so proud and excited about all the hard work that we have put into it. Like you say, to watch it come to fruition is such a cool feeling. The funny thing is that I’m so proud of this project and this body of work that I’ll literally spin my record and I’ll forget that it’s me. I’m a fan.
If you can’t be a fan of your own record, I think there’s something a little bit wrong about that.
I agree.
I was even watching the other day that your mom has played a small part in the project, so how much has it felt like a collaborative labour of love?
Yes for sure. There’s so many hands on deck, this is definitely not something that we threw together over night. We’ve been working on this thing for years – you know that. I mean, just seeing that my entire team give 190%, this has been a team effort and it’s been such a cool thing to see it come together. When we were recording ‘Neon Diamonds’ my momma happened to be in Nashville and girl, my momma can not carry a tune in a bucket, it’s bad, like real bad, but crazier things have happened. Momma ended up making it onto the record and she’s singing gang vocals on ‘Neon Diamonds.’ If you listen real close, you can hear her.
Everyone will be listening so closely to that track now.
Yeah, I’m telling you, she’s told everyone back home ‘I’ve made it on a Nashville record.’ (laughs)
I think my favourite track on the record is ‘Keeping Bars in Business’ – obviously we can’t go to a bar right now, but there’s so much on that track that everyone can relate to.
You’re the third person that has said that today! That’s crazy. I’m so glad. I wrote this song a few years ago, I had just gotten off the road and my parents were keeping my dog at the time – I had a little Boston terrier, her name was Pudding – and while I was on the road, they had to put her down and it was one of the hardest things I have ever dealt with. You know how it is when you lose a pet, she had moved to Nashville with me, she had lived in my camper with me, she’d licked the tears off my face. That was extremely difficult to deal with, but I had turned up to this co-write and they asked me how everything was going and I told them. It was so crazy that day, everybody who I was writing with were going through things – my co-writer’s mom had just had a stroke and the other one was going through something – and the crazy thing about it was that we were on the struggle bus, but there’s somebody right down the road who’s having the best day of their entire life. Those are the things, in my opinion, that keep the world turning and keep the world spinning, whether your heart is breaking or you’re celebrating, we’re all just keeping bars in business.
It’s a good message for 2020, at the end of the day, some people could have had the best year of their lives last year – I don’t know who those people are, but they probably exist. Looking down the tracklist, you have such a breadth of songwriters on there, so many different collaborators and people that you worked with, are there any people that you particularly gravitated toward for particular songs?
Yes for sure, if I have something that kind of hits me in the same vein as ‘Things A Man Oughta Know,’ I know that I need to take that idea to Jonathan Singleton, he is a dang master when it comes to that kind of stuff, but then with ‘WWDD,’ Casey Beathard and Michael Heeney will get it, they’ve been around a long time and they’ve written a bunch of stuff. I knew that they could throw that throwback, fun vibe on it. I know what their strengths are, and they know what mine are too. We just try to roll with it that way. It’s crazy because sometimes you have to write with the same people a lot to work out what you want to work on that person with. At the end of the day, all these songwriters on my record are incredible and they could write anything.
Going back to the original time I heard your music with ‘Dreamcatcher,’ this record is the core of everything you’re about but amped up a notch. What was it like working with Jay Joyce to put together the record and what did you want to say on the album, in comparison to the EP?
Absolutely, I definitely wanted people to see growth – that’s what I wanted to see and what my team wanted to see – and I knew that Jay could amp it up a notch. He really is a mad scientist and the cool thing about Jay is, he really got to know me – me as a person, my heart and my personality. He somehow incorporated that into my music, we were talking about the sound that I wanted to go down and I wanted it to be fresh, but familiar and the instruments to sound like they’ve got a little dust on them. He somehow mastered that.
He’s a magician. I look at all the different projects that he’s done and he’s enabled everyone as artists to be who they are, rather than putting his stamp everywhere.
Absolutely, he brought it out of me, he pulled it out. He also amped up my confidence and he’s helped me create and mould my sound. It’s such a cool, fun process – finding myself – and I feel like every single day, I found myself as a person a little more, and also as an artist and songwriter. To have people like Jay is such a blessing.
How naturally then did the record evolve and turn into Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’?
We went through about 200 songs and dwindled it down to 50, we still didn’t know where to start. There were so many different ways to go about this, but the song ‘Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’ continued to raise its hand, and the more I looked at the common denominator – it was that. It needed to be the title track and every single song on this record needed to be ‘Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin,’ whether it was ‘Dirty Looks’ or ‘Things A Man Oughta Know’ or ‘WWDD,’ we asked ourselves the question ‘is this sayin’ what I’m thinkin’? which made it cool and fun and a lot easier too, to know exactly what we were cutting. At the end of the day, they’re all my babies, you spend hours and hours just trying to perfect these songs and some of them might sit up on a shelf for the rest of my life, catching dust, but also, at the same time, I feel like every song serves a purpose, even if that’ just to get me to the next one.
Finally, you’ve had a huge amount of success with ‘Things A Man Oughta Know,’ how has it been seeing the evolution of that song?
It’s been so awesome, just seeing the reaction and the connection that people have made to this song is pretty overwhelming. I get messages daily from single mothers, from single dads, guys who gave up and got it wrong, even this one woman who was about to get a divorce and she sent this song to her husband and he snapped out of it. It really is crazy seeing the power of music and I’m so honoured and grateful that my song has that opportunity to change people’s lives. It has been so cool that the first song that does really well for me is one that I stand firm on, every line I believe and it’s all about having good character. It’s about treating people the way that you want to be treated. It’s about the damn golden rule.
Congratulations Lainey, I’m so happy that this project is finally being released into the world!
You’re so sweet I can’t wait to see you.
Thank you!
