Lainey Wilson on Staying True to Her Small-Town Roots After Her Career ‘Exploded’: ‘Being Fearless Got Me Here’ (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Lainey Wilson reflects on balancing fame with her personal life and staying grounded through therapy and family support

• Her Netflix documentary, streaming April 22, explores her rise to stardom, mental health struggles and egg-freezing journey

• Wilson credits her fiancé Devlin “Duck” Hodges for being her anchor

On a sunny Los Angeles day in late March, Lainey Wilson is commanding the set of her People cover shoot.

One minute she’s dolled up, posing on a bar in her signature cowboy hat and bell-bottoms. The next she’s dressed down in a trucker hat, her golden waves tucked into an oversize bomber jacket, as she heads out to catch a flight home to Nashville.

The switch from country superstar to incognito face in the crowd feels Hannah Montana-coded — fitting for a singer who impersonated the Disney icon at parties before finding fame herself.

“I feel like I have the best of both worlds,” Wilson tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story, lyrical reference intended. “I get to be the songwriter and businesswoman, and then I get to take the hat off every now and then and be Lainey the sister, the friend, the daughter, the fiancée.”

Lainey Wilson for PEOPLE
Credit: Alex G. Harper

Despite her success, Wilson, 33, feels she can still “go undercover pretty easily” in her daily life. Until she speaks.

“I could be at Walgreens or Walmart, and as soon as I’m checking out at the counter, the cashier will kind of look at me weird,” she says in her unmistakable Louisiana drawl. “There’s no hiding the voice.”

Since her 2019 breakout hit “Things a Man Oughta Know” introduced the world to that voice, Wilson has become one of country’s brightest stars, earning a Grammy, notching nine country radio No. 1s and landing a recurring role on the blockbuster Paramount series Yellowstone.

“Even 15 years in Nashville could not prepare me for the way my career exploded,” says Wilson, who will headline the Stagecoach music festival in Indio, Calif., the last weekend of April. “I mean, this is all I could have ever wanted and more.”

Now Wilson is giving fans a peek behind the scenes of her breakneck rise in the new Netflix documentary Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool, streaming April 22. It covers both her professional and her personal triumphs — including her engagement to former NFL player Devlin “Duck” Hodges, 30, who proposed in February 2025 — as well as her struggles with mental health.

Lainey Wilson for PEOPLE
Credit: Alex G. Harper

Wilson was raised in Baskin, La. (population approximately 200), by her dad, Brian, a fifth-generation farmer, and mom, Michelle, a schoolteacher.

After writing her first song at 9, she spent her teen years impersonating Hannah Montana, the fictional pop star played by Miley Cyrus. “I didn’t have the Malibu mansion, but I did have a little portable sound system,” she says.

Lainey Wilson with her parents in a 2017 Instagram
Credit: Lainey Wilson/Instagram

At 19, Wilson moved to Nashville in a camper trailer, then spent nearly a decade grinding before landing her major-label deal in 2018.

As her career took off, Wilson struggled with anxiety and depression, and a relentless schedule pushed her to her breaking point.

Lainey Wilson with the trailer she lived in when she moved to Nashville
Credit: ABC News

Advice from Reba McEntire helped: “’When I feel like I can’t do it anymore, I do it for somebody else,’” Wilson recalls McEntire telling her, adding, “It was like a light bulb went off.”

She carried that message into her Whirlwind world tour (which wrapped on March 6) by bringing a young “cowgirl of the night” onstage during each show and telling them, “You are beautiful, you’re smart, you’re talented, you can do anything.”

That sentiment helps keep Wilson grounded too.

“I’m not just a singer, songwriter, musician — that’s what I do,” she says. “Trophies and awards are things that come along with success, but it cannot define me as a person, because that’s when I lose sight of who I am. I got to keep my head screwed on straight.”

Lainey Wilson for PEOPLE
Credit: Alex G. Harper

Through it all, Wilson is thankful to have fiancé Hodges, whom she met through mutual friends in 2021, by her side.

In the two years before making their relationship public, Wilson realized that Hodges “loves Lainey way more than Lainey Wilson,” she says. “He understands what it means to really work hard for something that you’ve always dreamed about.”

Lainey Wilson with Devlin “Duck” Hodges in 2024
Credit: Chris Saucedo/WireImage

At home in Nashville the pair keep date nights low-key, “hanging with our dogs, drinking an old-fashioned,” she says. “He can cook the best steak in Nashville. He’s just that place that I get to come home to and fill my cup back up.”

Lainey Wilson for PEOPLE
Credit: Alex G. Harper

She counts the day Hodges proposed on the steps of country icon George Jones’s Franklin, Tenn., home as one of the happiest of her life.

“He makes me want to be a better person,” she says. “We’re a good team.”

Lainey Wilson for PEOPLE
Credit: Alex G. Harper

As her star continues to burn brighter, Wilson wants to hold on to her sense of wonder.

“Being fearless got me here,” she says. “We’re given one life — and I want to live it.”

For more from Lainey Wilson, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE on stands Friday.

Read the original article on People