Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along. I am so very excited to bring in my conversation this week with one of the biggest stars in all of music right now. She is country music sensation

Lainey Wilson. She is absolutely on fire and it comes after a long climb to get there. The 32-year-old

who comes from a tiny farming town in Baskin, Louisiana, it's called, population around 200,

might be a little more, might be a little less.

Grew up with her sister and her parents on the farm.

Her dad is an honest to goodness farmer.

She rode horses and helped on the farm.

Her mother, a school teacher.

And she had a dream from the time she was a little girl, five years old, then going

to Nashville at nine years old and deciding

she was going to end up there someday, graduated high school, moved to Nashville at 19, where she

lived in a trailer on property owned by a family friend who just kind of took her under his wing.

He was a producer, kind of showed her around Nashville a little bit, but it took her a long time,

as you'll hear, and a lot of rejection, more than a decade before she started to make it. She got her

first number one song in 2021, almost to the day, 10 years after she arrived in Nashville. So they

call it a 10-year town that proved to be true for her.

Might know some of her songs, Heart Like a Truck is a big one. Her album, Bell Bottom Country is the

one that has garnered all these awards, all the success. And now in August, coming out with a new

album called Whirlwind, which is appropriate because she has been in the middle of one for the last couple of

years. Touring on her own now, on the country's cool again tour, she spent the last year

opening for huge artists like Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen. I got a chance to see here.

It comes up in the conversation about a year ago last summer in Philadelphia went to see

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