Lainey Wilson He spent years in the music industry before becoming a celebrity, but at first he had a hard time dealing with his newfound fame.
In his new book for Netflix, Lainey Wilson: Keepin' Country CoolThe Grammy winner, 33, opened up about feeling anxious and depressed after her career took off around 2020.
“The last few years were brutal. Everything I dreamed of happened at once,” he recalls in the film, which premiered Wednesday, April 22. “When opportunities come to you and you haven't had them for so long, you want to just take them all. And I think a little bit of that was probably the fear that they weren't always there.”
This local star said “maybe I find myself honorable” in his work, which caused us to put aside someone who is not on stage.
“I think I couldn't hear it [like] myself for a few years,” he explained, “I had reached the point where I said, 'I don't know if I'll ever be the same.' I was very anxious, and the anxiety caused depression, and it's like depression caused more anxiety because I was like, 'Why in the world am I depressed during this time of my life? This is all I wanted.'”
He added, “I had a few … a lot of incidents, I guess you could say. I was just at a loss. It was like, 'I don't know if I can go on.'”
Wilson's manager, Mandelyn Monchickrecalled the scary moment when the “Whirlwind” singer called her crying at the airport saying she felt like she had “lost [her] mind.”
“I thought I would never come back from that,” Wilson recalled. “It was an intense attack, like, for days. And I'd played shows and everything while having panic attacks. It was scary. A chemical imbalance that happened. I was like, I'm out of control. And then the fear of thinking that you're going to be stuck in that thought – it causes more anxiety. It's just brutal, like a cycle.”
Wilson went on to say that he finally found out when he felt that his work was at a solid level.
Lainey Wilson in the Netflix documentary 'Lainey Wilson: Keepin' Country Cool.'
Courtesy of Netflix“I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to get it right, to be good, to be perfect, to show up, to sing a bad song, to look good doing it. All these things went there, like, they kept piling stress on me,” she said while feeling emotional. “And I think that when I realize that I can't completely get over it, like, say I'm hitting a bad note, say I'm not looking my best — I think knowing that I've found my place and I'm not going anywhere, I feel like now, like, I've put my stake in the ground, it definitely takes the pressure off.”
The CMA Award winner added that one of her idols, Reba McEntirehe gave him advice that stuck with him. (Wilson and McEntire, 71, shared Miranda Lambert last year on the “Trailblazer” single.)
“I said, 'This is a tough question, but what do you do when you feel like you can't go on?'” Wilson recalled. “And he said, 'I'm doing it for someone else.' And that's where it stood me in good stead. I get on that stage and I do it for other people.”
To him Us Weekly Covering the story last year, Wilson opened up about the day she realized she wasn't a small-town girl in Louisiana anymore, going from “selling, 87 tickets in Tuscaloosa” to breaking attendance records at the New York State Fair a few months later.
“I was getting ready for a show that day, and I was looking out the window of the bus, and I saw a few people putting their lawn chairs outside,” he said in November 2025. “Then before I got on stage, someone came up to the bus and said, 'You won't believe how many people are there.' That was one of the first times for me where I was like, 'Click your boots together – we're not Baskin anymore.'
Lainey Wilson: Keepin' Country Cool Debuts on Netflix on Wednesday, April 22.
