‘Whirlwind Deluxe’ Means More Songs, More Lainey Wilson

Backstage Country’s Elaina Smith, co-host is someone who won a Grammy, nine CMAs, 16 ACM awards, and has six number one hits. Lainey Wilson, who released her Whirlwind Deluxe album in August this year, will be spilling all the deets and stories behind the additional songs and the making of the album.  

Wilson admitted that her additional track, “Yesterday, All Day, Every Day,” tells her and her fiancé’s story, former NFL quarterback Devlin “Duck” Hodges. “’Yesterday, All Day, Every Day,’ tells a story about how me and Mr. Duck Hodges met. He is now my fiancé. It's a night that I will never forget. We ended up going to a place called Moby Dicky's on the water, had a time of our life, and then we went to a honky tonk called Silverado's, where we line danced all night long, and we just had the time of our life. So, it's our story.”  

Smith asked Wilson about the inspiration behind “Somewhere Over Laredo.” Wilson shared that the song is “tipping our hat to the classic song ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and it’s one of those songs where you remember the first time you heard it, you remember trying to like hit those big notes as you were a kid. And I just remember how that song made me feel. I wanted to somehow bottle it up and have that same kind of feeling in this interpolation that we decided to try to write.”  

She added, “I spent a lot of my time in the air, on a plane trying to fly to the next city, the next town, and the show. I catch myself looking out the window and dreaming and reminiscing and talking to God and coming up with song ideas. This gave me an opportunity to kind of step back into a pair of shoes that I wore years ago. It's talking about loss; it's about missing somebody. It is really important for me to be a voice for the people who are missing somebody, who do feel like they've lost somebody. So that's what it's about.”  

Smith said the music video for “Somewhere Over Laredo” is really creative. Wilson agreed, “I felt like it was time for us to take a step forward. I'm always about that classic country music video style where it just like tells a story just right out in front of you. I mean, those are the kind of music videos that I grew up watching. I would sit in front of the CMT, just sitting there watching every single music video. For this song, I felt like it did have a little bit of that theatrical sound to it, and it just like takes you somewhere. There is a piece of art in my house that I was thinking about whenever I was writing the song.”  

She continued, “When we were getting ready to put this music video together, I was like, ‘Man, if we could bring in those colors and that feeling from this piece of art, it's what we tried to do. We definitely used some tools that we had never used, even with the CGI stuff and tapping into all of those resources. But it was cool to be able to kind of step outside of the box and just make it a little different than everything that we've done in the past.”  

Watch the music video below.