Concert review: Lainey Wilson surges toward rock superstardom at Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl

"I scream 'hell yeah,' then get a pumping thump in my chest before I go onstage these days. I'm a female in country music who is allowed to bring enough energy onstage while shaking a leg and playing an electric guitar so that people don't forget my show when they leave. "

Before headlining at downtown Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl for the second of two nights Thursday, Lainey Wilson described to The Tennessean how it feels to embody the heartbeat of rock 'n' roll.

Even after the interview, it felt audacious to fully believe in her voice's growing rock-star energy as she takes full grip of crossing from country to rock superstardom. That is, until two minutes into watching her — after playing live for over 90 minutes — in a strumming guitar breakdown.

The furious mess of a kaleidoscope of swirling lights, flared custom-made spandex bell bottoms, dirty blond hair and driving rhythms represented significantly more than whatever truth country music arrives at after rhyming words and strumming a third chord.

Dig back four hours before when Wilson was sitting on her tour bus feeding french fries to her French bulldog before hitting the stage. She spoke about the magical power of having songs well-known enough to ask 20,000 attendees of the UK's C2C Festival to scream lyrics back at her because she — after a globetrotting schedule of sold-out winter tour dates over the past nine weeks — finally caught a cold and lost her voice.

"If that had happened last year, I couldn't have done that. Just like this tour bus and everything else, that's definitely rock 'n' roll."

Wilson's led country music's confluence with arena-sized rock-star energy the past few years, with what in all likelihood will be four No. 1 singles on country radio ("Things A Man Oughta Know," Cole Swindell duet "Never Say Never," HARDY collaboration "wait in the truck" and the power ballad "Heart Like A Truck" — the latter two neck-in-neck on their way up right now.)

This spate of success has also benefitted from two album releases ("Sayin' What I'm Thinkin'" and "Bell Bottom Country"), plus Academy of Country Music Award wins for New Female Artist of the Year and Song of the Year, plus Country Music Association Awards for Female Vocalist of the Year and New Artist of the Year.

One of the unintended benefits of the dominance of relatively few artists in country music in the past decade is that the genre's sudden, streaming-led, post-COVID quarantine shift in star power feels like a bold tsunami wave of energy consuming the genre. Because these new stars, like Wilson, have waited over a decade for success in a so-called "ten year town," they're overripe to be limited to simply country music stars they could've perhaps been years prior.

Country's new stars — especially like "wait in the truck" collaborators HARDY and Wilson — are embracing rock-styled stardom unlike the genre has experienced in five decades.

2023's early leader in this is HARDY. Wilson's a close second.

Hardy has decimated coastal biases towards country music's long-standing awkward mash-up of twanging, yokel stereotypes with arena rock spectacles like a whiskey-drunk and hellbound bachelorette party bus transplanted from Lower Broadway and careening down Sunset Boulevard or through Times Square. Journalists like Los Angeles' Bob Lefsetz called him uncool and uncompromised, while the New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh said he made "butt rock."

We're still seven months away from when HARDY and Wilson play Nashville's Municipal Auditorium together on Oct. 27.

That show will feature HARDY pile driving fans into sweat-drenched delirium as much as it will something more nuanced — and for many, likely more appealing — by Wilson.

There were already enough fans wearing all manner of the performer's trademark, vintage-style, wide-brimmed cowboy hats at Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl to fund a freshman-year student through a year at Vanderbilt University.

Wilson's website also offers $90 pairs of the star's brand of flared-leg pants — and her customized ones are at least twice as expensive.

But, if you want to be authentically like Wilson (and one look down at the main floor of Brooklyn Bowl for the bridge of "wait in the truck" into "Heart Like A Truck" indicates 1,500 people whooping and waving cell phone lights very much do), you must understand her hometown of Baskin, Louisiana, has a population of fewer than 200 people, most of whom are middle-class farmers.

If you're like Wilson was as a child, you get one pair of bell bottoms — likely much cheaper than that price point — and you wear them, as Wilson acknowledged in a January interview, so much that the only time you take them off is to wash them before you put them on again.

Concerning funk, it's not just over-worn pants at play in Wilson's rise.

Three notes into the live version of her song "Hillbilly Hippie," a transference occurs.

Flipping through your mind's corridors, you try to place the chords and vibes dripping from the track.

Then, it smacks you in the face with dark, grooving force.

The funky, swamp rock intonations of Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1968 single "Suzie Q."

"Swamp rock" is the turn of phrase used by '60s era music journalists to describe the fusion of blues, country, rockabilly and soul made by bands like Creedence borrowing from Delta bluesmen, Lousiana boogie-woogie jazz players and southern rockers.

Dig deeper into other moments of Wilson's set. She's evolved past being described as a Hannah Montana impersonator into a full-fledged adult cutting her teeth playing covers of songs like Jean Knight's 1971 classic "Mr. Big Stuff," Rick Derringer's "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo" and 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up?"

The three songs — iconic blasts of funk, blues rock and alternative pop — when given a run through the jungle emerge as the unmistakable "country with a flare" that Wilson's attempting to brand herself with.

That sound's appeal — filtered through mainstream country's top-tier pop sounds — is growing.

Wilson's Brooklyn Bowl show displayed the passionate devotion of her fans — plus other entertaining moments like when she was joined by popular TikTok breakdancers Darion "Reaper" Ahonen, Jordan "Cookup" Hopson, Ishmael "TK" Griffie and Jonte "Sir Esto" Williams.

"This new, exciting wave of country music is leaning into how so many country artists — who grew up loving rock 'n' roll — are crushing it by trusting the music that we grew up loving and respecting. That's making for dang good shows with some pizazz," Wilson says.

When asked about her sound and style's broader appeal, she cocks the brim of her wide blue cowboy hat and offers this:

"I'm past 'my give a damn being busted.' The time for me to play the kind of music that makes you stand up and say, 'whether you like it or not, I'm going to be exactly who I am,' that you play when the sun goes down, the drinks come out and you start listening to Eric Church and the Rolling Stones, has arrived."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Lainey Wilson surges toward rock superstardom at Nashville concert