When it rains, it pours.
This week, country star Lainey Wilson was a guest on the Artist Friendly with Joel Madden podcast (Good Charlotte frontman in case you’re unfamiliar), and she talked a lot about how she got her start in Nashville, coming from small town Baskin, Louisiana and knowing almost no one in Music City when she first arrived.
Lainey did have one important connection, though, an old friend of her grandfather who let her park her camper in his studio parking lot, who also had some connections and worked in the music industry.
On the Just Being ERNEST podcast a while back, Lainey talked about Jerry and how much he helped her in those early days:
“I moved here in August of 2011…There was a guy from my hometown, his name was Jerry Cupit. He had some success in the ’90s with like Ken Mellons, Kevin Sharpe…
And crazy story, my daddy’s daddy has always loved music, just wanted to support it any way he could. So in the ’70s he gave Jerry Cupit a few hundred bucks to help him move to Nashville and get started. And as a favor in return, Jerry let me live in his studio parking lot for free for those three years. So he was really my only contact that I knew.”
Madden asked about the hardest period of Lainey’s career thus far, and she opened up about Jerry’s death and how life-changing that was. They wrote over 300 songs together, and wrote every single day for three years. Jerry wound up getting sick, and ultimately passed away, which Lainey called a very dark time, because they had obviously gotten very close.
She said she had to start over at that point, and to add to the heartbreak, the boy she was dating (I think she knew him from back home, but it’s kind of unclear), was cheating on her, and got another girl pregnant, which is how she found out about the infidelity:
“I had to start over, from square one, and for me, it’s been a lot of moments like that where I’ve had to, I felt like, okay, I’ve got something going. It’s cooking. And then it kinda gets taken away, and I have to start over and switch gears and figure out a different way.
I think that’s another part of this business, coming up on a bunch of road blocks and figuring out how the hell to get around it. That was definitely a dark time in my life, because when you write 300 plus songs with somebody, you become really close. That was really hard, and during that time too, I was dating a boy who got a girl pregnant.
It was all happenin’ at the same time… I was like, when it rains, it pours. I’m telling you, I learned how to just embrace the heartbreak, ‘cuz I’m just like, is this happening to me? Like, am I getting punked? Is it happening just so I can have something to write about? But into now, I’m learning how to adjust with my life changing. It is a lot of pressure.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone cheating on Lainey, because she’s such a gem, but she’s seemingly found real love with her boyfriend of quite a few years now, former Steelers quarterback Devlin “Duck” Hodges.
I love how open Lainey is about these kinds of things, though, because I think it’s so important for anyone, but especially young women who look up to her, to hear about the hard times and how much Lainey went through, and put into, making her dreams a reality.
You can watch the full episode below.
And I’ll leave you with the sweet love song that Duck inspired from Lainey’s most recent album Whirlwind, “4X4XU.”
“4X4XU”
