On his 2023 full-length album, Pretty Little Poison, Warren Zeiders covered a little-known 14-year-old Chris Stapleton song, “Inside Your Head,” which Stapleton had recorded as part of rock duo The Jompson Brothers.

While many artists would regard a Stapleton-sung song as beyond anything they would dare attempt, the task was undaunting to newcomer Zeiders.

“It’s full circle for me. I’m a huge Stapleton fan,” he tells Billboard. Zeiders includes another Stapleton song, “Love on the Line” on his new album, Relapse, out Friday (Aug. 23) via Warner Records. Zeiders is perhaps one of the few country music newcomers with the growl and grit in his voice capable of making such a song his own.

The Pennsylvania native grew up playing lacrosse and while a student at Maryland’s Frostburg State University, a series of sports concussions forced him onto the sidelines permanently. Zeiders, 24, turned his interests to music. In December 2020, he released the original song “On the Run,” and soon signed with Underscore Works’ Charly Salvatore for management. He quickly followed with his breakthrough hit “Ride the Lightning,” which has been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. His EP The 717 Tapes followed in 2021, and this February, “Pretty Little Poison” become his first No. 1 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart (the song has also earned RIAA double-platinum status).

On his new 10-song album, Zeiders seems poised to continue that surge, with the title track currently sitting at No. 36 on Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart. The album centers around a heart-shattering arc from romance to betrayal on songs including “Intoxicated” and “Stone’s Throw Away.” Scattered across the album are one-word titles, such as “Addictions,” “Betrayal” and “Intoxicated,” which draw on drug and/or alcohol-fueled imagery, but often delve more into entanglements of the soul.

“In ‘Addictions,’ it’s about choosing my addictions over a lover — and when I wrote that song, I was thinking about the addiction I have for the music industry,” Zeiders says. “I’m choosing that over being with someone. It is saying, ‘I can’t be the person you want me to be right now, because I’m in my 20s and focused on this career.’ It’s fun to take that concept, like a drug term, and flip it on its head.”

The music on his new album, which he co-produced with Mike Elizondo and Ross Copperman, traverse a number of genres. Some of the newer songs stem from a June writing retreat in Miami, where he worked with pop hitmakers J Kash, Blake Pendergrass, and Ali Tamposi, who have written tunes for acts like Justin Bieber, Maroon 5 and Selena Gomez, as well as for country hitmaker Morgan Wallen.

“It’s been fun for me, stepping outside of that box and watching those people come into the country scene and want to be part of it,” Zeiders says. “Between JKash [co]-writing one of the biggest songs in country music, ‘Last Night’ for Morgan Wallen, it’s been cool to see.”

As with many songs in today’s data-driven music ecosystem, fans led the way in deciding the release of his new radio single, “Relapse,” after Zeiders and his team saw the response on Instagram and TikTok.

In-person, Zeiders’ laid-back, joyous persona belies the tough-guy persona crafted in his press materials and album artwork — but his collection of breakup-driven songs are heartfelt.

“People like to joke about it, but I’m a lover boy. I’m a teddy bear at heart. But I know with the long hair and cowboy imagery I give off a different perception. I do have a tendency of breaking my own heart,” he says. “I fall for these women and these kinds of things and maybe it’s not the right fit. It’s like, ‘I’m going away for two months on tour — and can they handle the distance?’”

“Betrayal” is a song Zeiders relates to all too well, alluding to a past romantic breakup: “That was an interesting part of my life. Not a fun one, but it is what it is. We all got our stories — but more than anything the overall process has been a fun one, and a totally different vibe from the first record.”

Zeiders will soon open shows for Jelly Roll on his The Beautifully Broken Tour this fall, while gearing up for a jam-packed 2025 — which includes both a slate of headlining U.K. shows beginning in January, followed by his stateside The Relapse Tour, which launches in March, with shows in cities including Nashville, Atlanta and Pittsburgh.

“I’m going on the biggest tour in the fall and being a direct support artist for Jelly Roll, who is touching so many lives, and [he’s] just massive in pop culture right now — the man is everywhere,” he says. “I feel that being in front of that many people night after night, whether it’s [playing for] my fans [or] having a chance to win over his and bring them into the fold, what’s going to be on my mind night after night is leaving a lasting impact, being a great opener for Jelly, making sure the fans are ready for him.”

Zeiders notes that he’s never traveled to the U.K., but as with picking songs, he’s letting fan demand lead the way on the European tour.

“Just looking at the numbers and looking at the demand, what’s super cool is I’m able to skip some steps. I’m not just going into 400, 500-seat rooms. We’re doing 1,000 and 2,000-seat rooms for my first appearance. It’s exciting to see the fan base and the people supporting my music and wanting me to come over there. The demand is there, and it’s going to be a fun experience.”

Just a week before a court-ordered auction of Damon Dash’s one-third stake in Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records, there’s a stunning new wrinkle: New York State says he owes more than $8.7 million in unpaid taxes and that the Roc-A-Fella proceeds must be used to pay down the huge debt.

In a motion filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, New York’s Department of Taxation & Finance asked to legally intervene in the proceedings ahead of the Aug. 29 auction, in which the United States Marshals Service will auction off Dash’s 33.3% interest in the storied record company.

The tax authorities claim that Dash owes more than $8.7 million in unpaid taxes and penalties from personal income he reported from 2005 and 2018 – and that the Roc-A-Fella auction might be their last shot at recouping a debt that has been “delinquent for far too long.”

“To date, the Department has been unsuccessful in its efforts to collect the unpaid New York State tax debt owed by Dash,” attorneys for the state wrote. “Intervening in this matter may be the Department’s only opportunity to collect some of the unpaid taxes Dash owes to New York.”

The new wrinkle is sure to complicate an already-complex situation. The Roc-A-Fella auction is being held to satisfy an $823,000 judgment against Dash, won by movie producer Josh Webber in a civil lawsuit over a failed film partnership. But New York City’s Department of Social Services will actually have first dibs, since Dash also owes a total of $145,096 in unpaid child support.

In their filing on Wednesday, the tax department stressed that it does not seek to jump ahead of child services in pecking order for auction proceeds. But it offered no such promise to Webber – and pointedly noted that it had secured a lien against the Roc-A-Fella proceeds more a decade earlier than he had.

Set to take place next week at a Manhattan hotel, the Roc-A-Fella auction will have a minimum bid of $1.2 million. The sale will be for Dash’s stake in Roc-A-Fella Inc., an entity whose primary asset is Jay-Z’s iconic debut album Reasonable Doubt. The rest of the catalog of music released by Roc-A-Fella, which dissolved in 2013, is owned by other entities and isn’t involved.

The owners of the other two-thirds of Roc-A-Fella — label cofounders Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) and Kareem “Biggs” Burke — have already attempted to stop the auction, including making changes to the company’s bylaws and intervening in the lawsuit. But a federal judge rejected such opposition in February.

The auction will be coordinated by Webber’s attorney, Chris Brown, who told Billboard earlier this month that he had received numerous inquiries from potential bidders, including corporate investors, high-profile individuals and collectors. Brown not immediately return a request for comment Thursday on the Department of Taxation & Finance’s request to access the proceeds.

Though the auction’s minimum bid has been set at $1.2 million, it’s entirely unclear how much a potential buyer is going to be willing to spend on Dash’s one-third stake.

The royalties from Reasonable Doubt would likely provide them a revenue stream; since its 1996 release, Reasonable Doubt has racked up 2.2 million equivalent album units in the U.S., according to Luminate, including 21,500 units so far this year. But the eventual buyer also would be a minority owner in a company controlled by hostile partners, with little ability to perform typical due diligence on the asset they’re about to purchase. And Roc-A-Fella’s rights to Reasonable Doubt could potentially expire in 2031, thanks to copyright law’s termination right.

If any money from the auction is left over, it will go to Dash himself. In a statement to Billboard last month, his attorney Natraj Bhushan said that he and his client would be at the Aug. 29 event and “expect a robust auction with bids entering the several millions if not higher.” Bhushan did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday on the Department of Taxation & Finance’s request to access the proceeds.

Mr. David Washington stands on the grounds that he has tended for decades, amid the Georgia Pines that flood much of the property, as the early-morning June heat creeps across the lawns. Now in his 70s, he’s quick to laugh and does so often, each one punctuating his thick, Southern drawl as he tells the story of the day, some 35 years ago, when Mr. James Brown called out to him and changed his life.

It was the late 1980s, and Mr. Washington, as everyone calls him, had gotten off a 12-hour shift at the cotton mill in Graniteville, some 14 miles away, and gone straight to Mr. Brown’s estate in Beech Island, S.C., when the Godfather of Soul summoned him to the house’s front porch. He had a series of pointed questions for his groundskeeper: Did he smoke? Nothing other than his Newports, Mr. Washington said. Did he drink? He and his wife would have a glass on special occasions, but that was all. Well then, Mr. Brown wanted to know, why were his eyes so red? He explained about the mill job; that his part-time work for Mr. Brown was a way to make ends meet; that he had been on his feet, by then, for hours on end. Well, that wouldn’t do, Mr. Brown replied.

“ ‘You go back down to that plant and tell them you’re putting in your two-week notice — what you make down there, I’ll pay you double if you come work for me,’ ” Mr. Washington recalls the boss saying before breaking out in another laugh. “I said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Brown!’ ”

Over the next 15-plus years, Mr. Washington became more than just Mr. Brown’s full-time groundskeeper. He became a driver, an assistant, a confidant and, after Mr. Brown’s maid fell ill, something of a jack of all trades. “I started working in the house: running his bathwater, doing his grocery shopping, making the bed, babysitting; I did a little bit of everything around here,” he says. “He didn’t like to be by himself, so sometimes I’d sit right in the house with him and we’d watch Westerns, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, the news.” Mr. Washington was the one who, in late December 2006, drove Mr. Brown to the hospital after his dentist heard something in the Godfather’s chest and recommended he get it checked out; and he was there, in the early hours of Christmas Day, when the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business succumbed to pneumonia and took his last breath.

More than 17 years after he made the drive back to Beech Island alone, Mr. Washington is still here. He has kept watch over Brown’s house through a succession of three estate trustees, a Christie’s auction, a 15-year legal battle among Brown’s heirs over his assets and, now, under the stewardship of Primary Wave, which purchased the assets of his estate in December 2021 for a reported $90 million. Primary Wave — the publishing, marketing, branding and content firm that touts itself as being in the “icons and legends” business and also has stakes in the rights of Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, Prince and more — acquired Brown’s publishing, master-royalty income, name and likeness rights and the Beech Island property, with its 60-plus acres, the mansion in which Brown lived since the late 1970s and everything in it, including a dozen cars, two tour buses and even the food that had remained in the cabinets since his death. The company also retained Mr. Washington to look after the place. “He’s our resident historian,” says Donna Grecco, Primary Wave’s asset manager who has overseen the cataloging and archiving of the estate. “He’s a treasure.”

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Primary Wave, founded by veteran label executive Larry Mestel in 2006, has a long history of reinvigorating the intellectual property of music’s giants, both living and departed, whether through new remixes, samples or interpolations of their work, partnerships with brands (its first major success, in 2008, was a sneaker deal with Converse that featured Kurt Cobain lyrics on a line of shoes) or big-ticket content plays like the 2022 Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Several estate and asset deals the company has done came with troves of personal items and memorabilia that took months to sift through and organize.

But the Brown deal marked the first time the company acquired an actual house. (After finalizing the acquisition of 50% of the Prince estate in August 2022, Primary Wave now also owns a stake in Paisley Park.) And what the company found on the compound, which sits just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga., was a home almost entirely preserved as it was on the day Brown died, down to the Christmas tree that still stands in the foyer, with unopened presents underneath.

To walk through its rooms is to step into a moment frozen in time: big, clunky TVs and VCRs by brands long out of business; Christmas decorations on the mantel; a matching collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in his office; phone books on the shelves. Mirrors, elephant motifs, bamboo poles and marble are everywhere. Inside Brown’s personal hair salon there’s a basket of dozens of hair curlers, with bottles and cans of hair product lining the shelves. A mix of cultural artifacts — African, Native American, Indian, East Asian — adorn every room; each light switch cover is a photo of Brown holding a street sign with his name on it. Grecco, with her team’s help and Mr. Washington’s expertise, has been working to restore everything to precisely where it was during Brown’s life, before a series of museums (including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) and the one-time auction resulted in some items shifting around and being moved in and out.

“When we first came into this house, there were boxes everywhere,” Grecco remembers. She and a team of archivists went room by room, photographing everything, scanning documents, protecting clothing, entering information into spreadsheets and documenting where things were found and where they should go. “We’ve had this estate for two-and-a-half-years — we’re still doing it,” she says. “You put together a plan of how to approach it from the most delicate and respectful angle knowing that this isn’t a museum — this was somebody’s living space.”

At the same time, the rest of Primary Wave got to work, and the executive team went down to Beech Island to walk through the property. “When we are stepping into the full gamut of an artist’s life and you can touch the cars and go on the tour bus, it helps us with our ideation and what we’re going to do on a marketing level and a content level,” says Ramon Villa, Primary Wave’s COO. “The closer we are to the assets and we see how the artist lived, it helps us ideate more.”

Already, some of the team’s ideas have had an impact. In 2022, Primary Wave licensed Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” to Amazon for its Mother’s Day “Woman’s World” campaign; the ad won a Clio Award in January for best use of music in film and video. The following month, plant-based milk company Silk featured Jeremy Renner singing Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in a Super Bowl ad. The Netflix films You People (“The Payback”) and Shirley (“Think [About It]”) also dipped into the catalog, while the upcoming Peacock film Fight Night incorporated “The Boss” into its trailer and The Wonder Years used “I’m Black and I’m Proud” in a period-specific scene. “A lot of what we’re trying to connect the dots to is either period-specific projects in film and TV or just more generally catalog-based projects,” Primary Wave head of global synch Marty Silverstone says. In partnership with Republic Records, the estate also put out a previously unreleased archival song, “We Got To Change” — recorded in August 1970 — in tandem with the February release of a four-part A&E docuseries, James Brown: Say It Loud.

In fact, one of the challenges Primary Wave faces as it looks at content opportunities for the Brown estate is that so many things have already been done. In 2014, a biopic starring Chadwick Boseman, Get On Up, was released to positive reviews. Around a dozen other documentary-style or live performance-based films on Brown have come in the past 20 years. “There’s been a lot done,” Primary Wave partner/chief content officer Natalia Nastaskin says. “But there are so many stories that are part of Mr. Brown’s life.”

Nastaskin cites films such as 2023’s Air, about the creation of Michael Jordan’s Nike empire, and 2020’s Academy Award-nominated One Night in Miami…, centered on a meeting between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, as examples of how a figure like Brown could appear in a major film without making another cradle-to-grave biopic. “It’s about isolating these very important moments in time and focusing on them, and focusing on ways that they haven’t been dissected before,” she says. A live-theater project is also in the works.

But for an artist who dominated music for decades, then earned a second life as one of the most-sampled talents in hip-hop, Primary Wave is looking far beyond the obvious opportunities to keep Brown’s legacy front and center for future generations. “With new media and emerging platforms and things like [artificial intelligence], we get a ton of incoming traffic with wanting Mr. Brown, wanting to create the next ABBA: Voyage experience that is based on Mr. Brown’s live performances,” Nastaskin says, referencing the successful virtual concert series of the Swedish band that debuted earlier this year. “We’re having those conversations, but we’re very selective because it’s very hard to get Mr. Brown right as an avatar. It has to be perfect, and if it’s not perfect, then we’re not interested in doing it.”

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The first thing most people notice when they get to Augusta is the heat. The summer has barely begun, but the heat already wraps the city like a cocoon, standing at 98 on the thermostat but more like quicksand on Broad Street. Anyone in their right mind is indoors, giving the streets an almost Potemkin feel, though one man lounging in the shade with a trumpet outside an empty club called The SOUL Bar hints at the history that thrums below the surface.

Brown was born in South Carolina but raised in Augusta, and the murals, statues and soul references that permeate the city reflect his continuing influence. He’s an icon, a genius and means many different things to many different people. “Entrepreneur, self-made, proud, confident,” says Bennish Brown, president/CEO of Destination Augusta, which promotes tourism in the city. “A lot of Augusta’s history and progress is tied to the way James Brown lived his life: constantly innovating, evolving and always looking for opportunities that made sense.”

Though the Brown house is technically in South Carolina, Augusta lies just 8 miles away. And the city will be an important partner in Primary Wave’s ultimate vision for the house: a Brown version of Elvis Presley’s home-turned-museum, Graceland.

In pursuit of that, Primary Wave will document the continuing restoration process through a development deal with Page Turner, the licensed real estate agent/TV producer who hosts HGTV’s Fix My Flip. “We want people to be able to come and peek behind the curtain of James Brown’s home and have a space with some creative and educational opportunities, too, because education was pretty important to him,” says Primary Wave’s Songhay Taylor, who runs point on all things house-related.

But there is one important distinction between Graceland and the Brown home. “Memphis is a city that gets a lot more tourists and traffic as a music city,” Villa says. “So as we look at what is a realistic approach to having his house be open to the public, we’re working with the city of Augusta as they try to build up their tourism to make a comprehensive plan.” That, Destination Augusta’s Brown says, could include marketing the estate as the focal point of a regionwide attraction with James Brown at its center — “a dream come true.”

To many, Augusta is most synonymous with The Masters, the crown jewel of global golf tournaments, played each April at Augusta National Golf Club. But Brown’s story aligns better with how locals see themselves and their city than The Masters, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business a better avatar than the golfers who visit once a year to play an exclusive course. Brown, after all, pulled himself up from sharecropping roots to the top shelf of culture; from picking cotton to shaking hands with the Pope; from dropping out of school to working with a half-dozen successive American presidents on free education initiatives for kids across the country. (His estate stipulates that his master-­recording royalties support educational opportunities for Georgia and South Carolina youth; Primary Wave has honored this by contributing a portion of all revenue to a permanent trust run by Brown’s family.)

His story was one version of the American dream — good, bad and ugly. And there was an ugly. Brown’s sterling musical reputation is deeply scarred by allegations of domestic violence against a series of wives and girlfriends, often spurred by alleged drug use, as well as arrests for assault and drug possession for which he served a prison sentence in the late 1980s, among other lurid incidents and accusations, particularly near the end of his life. “We’re not running from that aspect of him, but we’re also paying homage to what he did throughout history, the trails he blazed and the things he stood on from education to Black empowerment, entrepreneurialism, his principles,” Taylor says. “It’s about not ignoring the human elements of him, but also celebrating him as well.”

If things go to plan, Augusta will soon be even more widely known as the home of James Brown — the City of Soul, perhaps, or of Funk — where his legacy and influence are on full display. (As Brown put it in an interview featured in the A&E docuseries, “I created funk. God and me.”) “In order to create an overall immersive experience, we need the city of Augusta to help tell those stories,” Taylor says. “Where he shoeshined, where he buck-danced, where he would do shows, where he went to church — all of those things that are part of the overall story.”

And for some, that story is not entirely in the past. Mr. Washington recounts that long, lonely drive back to Beech Island from the hospital on Christmas Day, passing through the wrought-iron gates for the first time since the boss had gone.

“I come down the hill — you could see right to the porch — and it looked like he was standing out there with his hands folded up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mr. Brown, you know you got pneumonia, you need to get back in the house!’ And then the closer I got, his spirit just faded away.” For a few days afterward, he remembers the house alarm going off for no reason, lights flickering in different rooms, an unsettling feeling.

He has other memories, too — driving back-and-forth with Mr. Brown to Atlanta, going down to church on Sundays and then visiting Mr. Brown’s mother in the nursing home afterward, stopping for fried chicken on the way back. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of him,” he says. “Any time he’d crack a joke or something…” Mr. Washington trails off, then laughs again. “I could visualize his face right there. I know it’s been some years, but it seems like he’s been gone just yesterday.”

For more exclusive photos of the James Brown home, read here.

This story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.

“I’m here for a day then we’re back out, just coming here long enough to run a few errands and repack a bag,” Lainey Wilson tells Billboard in her signature Louisiana twang, on a rare day in Nashville for the singer-songwriter. She’s preparing for a slate of West Coast dates on her headlining Country’s Cool Again Tour — but even during her brief time in Music City, she’ll also attend the ACM Honors and make a surprise visit to her Bell Bottoms Up Restaurant & Bar, which opened in downtown Nashville earlier this year.

At the same time, the four-time Billboard Country Airplay chart-topper is gearing up for the release of her new studio album, appropriately titled Whirlwind, out Friday (Aug. 23) via BBR Music Group/BMG.

That swirl of touring and recording has also come with a swiftly accumulating pile of accolades. In November, Wilson became the first woman since Taylor Swift in 2011 to take home the coveted CMA entertainer of the year honors. In February, she earned her first Grammy win, with her 2022 album Bell Bottom Country taking home best country album. In May, she doubled up on her entertainer of the year win, taking home the same accolade at the ACM Awards. Less than a month later, she was inducted as a member of the Grand Ole Opry. On Wednesday (Aug. 21), she was honored with the ACM’s coveted triple crown award and the organization’s milestone award.

The momentum has been hard-fought for this small-town Baskin, Louisiana native, who found work as a Hannah Montana impersonator early on (she recently had a full-circle moment, honoring Hannah Montana actress/singer Miley Cyrus during a Disney Legends event). She moved to Nashville in 2011, living in a camper near Bellevue while pursuing writers’ rounds and co-writing sessions. She released two independent projects before signing with BBR Music Group/BMG in 2018. In 2021, she released her major-label breakthrough, Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’.

That same year, almost exactly a decade after moving to Nashville, she earned her first Country Airplay No. 1: “Things a Man Oughta Know.” She’s followed that with a steady stream of both solo and collaborative hits, including the top 5 hits “Heart Like a Truck” and “Wait in the Truck” (with HARDY), her three-week solo chart-topper “Watermelon Moonshine” and the two-week chart-toppers “Save Me” (with labelmate Jelly Roll) and “Never Say Never” (with Cole Swindell).

She says the process of writing for Whirlwind was markedly different from her previous projects. “I realized very quickly as my career grows and changes, there are a million other parts of this job that I just didn’t know existed,” Wilson says. “For this, it had to be quality over quantity. I couldn’t write 200 songs to get to my 14 [songs on Whirlwind]. I had to map out what I want to share, where do I want to get vulnerable, and really figure out the message I want to bring.”

While the new album includes some of Wilson’s mainstay co-writers, including Dallas Wilson and Trannie Anderson (who, collectively known as the Heart Wranglers, co-wrote “Heart Like a Truck” and several songs on Whirlwind), Wilson also was intentional about adding new writers to the fold — including Aaron Raitiere and Jon Decious, writers on songs like “4x4xU” and the funky kiss-off track “Ring Finger.”

“I knew they had this quirkiness to their writing that I wanted to tap into,” Wilson says, noting that they were going for a Jerry Reed feel on “Ring Finger.” “I had been telling them I wanted a song that showed my speaking voice, because a lot of people talk about my accent — whether they love it or hate it, they talk about it.”

“It’s fun for me to step out of my comfort zone and write from someone else’s perspective,” she continues. “But as I got deeper into the song, I think it was like verse two that I realized maybe I’m not stepping into someone else’s shoes—maybe this is really me. I do have a bit of a crazy side and a little spunk, and I haven’t gotten to show that side of my personality as much as I have with ‘Ring Finger.’”

Despite her success with duets, Whirlwind features just one collaboration—with a woman she calls “my sounding board for a lot of things,” Texas native and fellow singer-songwriter Miranda Lambert. The two, along with songwriter Luke Dick, wrote “Good Horses,” an ode to the pull of both the adventure of the road and the comforts of home, while spending a day at Lambert’s farm outside of Nashville.

“Miranda said, ‘Come hang out and take a nap. Me and Brendan [McLoughlin, Lambert’s husband] will feed you and then maybe we can write a song.’ They made burgers and pasta, we had everything,” Wilson recalls. “I had this [song] idea for quite a while and a lot of people had passed us up on writing it. Looking back on it, I’m glad they did because it was supposed to be us who wrote it together. But I think the magic kind of came from me and her having a lot in common when it comes to that love of the road, having a gypsy soul.”

“As we were sitting up on her balcony, three bluebirds flew up and landed on the balcony,” Wilson adds. “She and Luke were sitting in the same spot where those bluebirds had landed when they were writing [Lambert’s 2019 hit ‘Bluebird’].”

Lainey, who has become a mentor for rising women artists like Anne Wilson and Ella Langley, says of Lambert, “She’s become that girl in my life in the industry that just calls and checks on me. Even yesterday, she just sent me a text and said, ‘Love you. Wherever you are, I’m thinking about you. Sending you all the good vibes.’ I think it’s really important to have women like that in your corner in general, not with just the music industry, but you just got to have those folks around you. I met her about three years ago, and I’ve been able to go to her and she just has some good insight. I try to make sure that I go to people like that who have been there and done it.”

Another album standout is closer, “Whiskey Colored Crayon,” sparked from a word exercise from co-writer Josh Kerr, who took lists of hundreds of words, mixing and matching them to see if ideas spark. Landing on the words “whiskey” and “crayon,” they began etching the tearful-yet-hopeful story of how a young child’s innocent question to his teacher — asking for a whiskey-colored crayon to complete a drawing of his father — catalyzed change in his father’s life.

“I come from a family of teachers. My mama was a teacher, all my aunts, my grandma, my daddy taught for a minute,” Wilson says. “I see how much of a difference they make in kids’ lives and I know they hear so many different things from these kids. In country music, I think of sad stories and storytelling, but even when I’m telling a story like that, I can’t help but have some kind of triumph or resilience.”

Of course, some songs lean into Wilson’s own life, from the title track to a few love songs inspired by her boyfriend of over three years, Devlin “Duck” Hodges. “It is really fun to sing about love when you mean it,” she says of songs such as “4x4xU” and “Call a Cowboy.”

Simultaneously with her surging music career, Wilson has further been elevated in the spotlight through her role as Abby, a musician, on the hit series Yellowstone. This week, it was revealed that Wilson will be a part of the upcoming season of Yellowstone, through an ad calling for extras for a concert scene featuring the singer. The second half of season five, the final season of the show, premieres Nov. 10.

“I’ll tell you, I’m so excited,” Wilson says of her upcoming work on the series, though she’s mum on specifics. “We’re waiting to hear all of those details about how much involvement I’m going to have. But as soon as they let me know, I’m going to learn the lines and do my thing.”

Beyond Yellowstone and a seemingly ever-expanding slate of brand partnerships, which have included Kendra Scott, Wrangler, Charlie 1 Horse and Stanley, Wilson says she’s “starting to realize other opportunities are coming that I never knew existed. There is so much I want to do — I want to try voiceover acting. I would love to do a country cartoon; if you need a redneck cartoon, I got you. I’d love to play another role of some sort or write a whole soundtrack.”

She adds, “There’s so much I want to do, but as long as I can get up and do what I love to do every day, this ain’t a bad life to live.”

Having forged a reputation for relentless work ethic and having piled up accolades and milestones over the past few years, Wilson has allowed herself at least one splurge — though, true to her nature, it’s a practical one.

“I got me some land,” she says proudly. “I’m going to try to develop it here [near Nashville] soon and get it going, but it’s got some beautiful trails and eventually I’m going to build a barn on it and get some horses of my own up here. All of my horses right now are back home in Louisiana. Those are the things I guess my family just taught me to be super proud of — owning a piece of America. I don’t see myself going out and splurging on ridiculous things. I enjoy doing things for my family and stuff like that, but I don’t see myself changing much.”

The Democratic National Convention continued on Wednesday night (Aug. 21) at Chicago’s United Center for the evening’s “A Fight for Our Freedoms” theme, and more music stars performed onstage to celebrate Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential nomination.

Maren Morris delivered her protest song, “Better Than We Found It.” She sang to the crowd: “When lines of tomorrow are drawn/ Can I live with the side that I chose to be on?/ Will we sit on our hands, do nothing about it?/ Or will we leave this world better than we found it?”

Stevie Wonder followed with some powerful remarks for the audience, before performing “Higher Ground,” off his 1973 album, Innervisions, his first of three consecutive LPs to win the Grammy for album of the year. “This is a moment to tell your children where you were and what you did,” he declared. “When we stand between history’s pain and tomorrows promises we must choose courage complacency.”

Having supported Harris’ campaign from the beginning, John Legend also took the stage. Joined by Sheila E., he paid tribute to Prince by singing “Let’s Go Crazy” from the late icon’s 1984 album Purple Rain.

Harris’ selection for Vice President, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, spoke Wednesday night, accepting the vice presidential nomination. Additionally, Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and former President Bill Clinton all shared remarks.

Harris took over the presidential campaign from President Joe Biden, who spoke on the opening night of the DNC. On Thursday night, when P!nk is scheduled to perform, the attorney-turned-politician will accept the presidential nomination.

Watch the performances below: