Lainey Wilson has a Top 10 hit with “4X4XU,” the second single from her latest Whirlwind album, released in August. The song, written by Wilson, along with Jon Decious and Aaron Raitiere, is one that Wilson once thought she might never write, and likely wouldn’t have if she didn’t have a hit in 2022 with “Wait in the Truck,” her collaboration with HARDY.

“For so long, I was like, ‘I’m not going to write about trucks.’” Wilson tells Billboard. “That’s what everybody does. [But] every single one of my biggest songs is about a damn truck. I couldn’t help it, but I guess you just write what you know. And the truth is, trucks are a big part of my childhood and even with the way that I live now, I’m always up and down the road.”

Wilson wrote “4X4XU” in Indianapolis, while performing as part of the 96th annual FFA Convention. It was a fitting place to write what is likely to be Wilson’s eighth No. 1 hit.

“I was excited to be at the FFA Convention,” Wilson remembers. “My daddy started one of the very first FFAs at Louisiana Tech in Ruston. It just felt cool. It felt like, ‘Man, I want to kind of write a song about my people. I want to write a song about keeping my people close.’’

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the CMA

When performing “4X4XU” at a Nashville show, Wilson said she likely wouldn’t have written the song if not for her longtime boyfriend, Devlin “Duck” Hodges.

“The truth is, I write what I know, and I finally found a man worth writing about,” Wilson said (via American Songwriter). “So you know it’s a love song because y’all probably thought, ‘Dang, she ain’t got it in her… but I do. I got me a cheerleader.'”

Wilson wrote “4X4XU” with Decious and Raitiere in less than an hour, but neither Wilson nor the other writers could have predicted how much producer Jay Joyce would bring the song to life.

“Jay does this a lot,” Wilson boasted. “He kind of takes you to outer space. He’ll kind of take you somewhere up in the clouds, and then when you’re coming back into that chorus, it’s almost like he brings you back down to earth. When you can get both of those feelings — when you can feel grounded and rooted, like your feet are on the ground but also feel like your head is in the clouds — to me, there’s something really special about being able to feel both in a song.”

Wilson will wrap up 2024 by performing as part of New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash. She also hints that she will be hitting the road in 2025, although those dates have yet to be announced.

“We’re gonna be touring,” Wilson hinted to Variety. “We’re in the weeds of figuring all that out right now. But it’s fun. As our team grows and as the career grows and everything, with more people having their hands on things, it’s starting to really start to run like a well-oiled machine. And, because it happened so fast, it was just like, ‘Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.’ But all of a sudden we’ve got lots of new team members, and I feel like now we’re kind of starting to get into the groove of it. So we’re just gonna be touring a lot, and hopefully filming some more stuff. We’ll see what that looks like. Just being creative — that’s what I want to do.”

Find “4X4XU” and all of Wilson’s music and upcoming shows at LaineyWilson.com.