A beach vacation, a piña colada and a gut feeling all helped Lainey Wilson say yes to a Cole Swindell duet

ABC

Lainey Wilson has got another hit on her hands, as “Never Say Never” — her duet with Cole Swindell, and the follow-up to her chart-topping “Things a Man Oughta Know” — is inside the top 10 and rising at country radio.

It may still be cold and dreary in Nashville, but when Cole first sent Lainey the song, she was someplace much more tropical: on a beach vacation.

“There I am, sitting on a beach in Mexico on my first vacation in, like, 10 years, and he texts me out of the blue,” she remembers, adding that the song hooked her as soon as she heard it. “Well, I was drinking a piña colada. I don’t know if that had anything to do with me saying yes, but y’all, I listened to the first verse and chorus and knew immediately that this song was special.”

All jokes — and alcoholic beverages — aside, Lainey says the song gave her the same kind of excitement she’d felt when she was working on “Things a Man Oughta Know.”

“It made me feel the same kind of feelings I felt the day that I wrote ‘Things a Man Oughta Know,’ or the day that we recorded it,” she notes. “It’s a completely different kind of song, but it still gave me that feeling that everybody wants to feel.”

Lainey’s knack for recognizing a powerful song hasn’t let her down yet. “Things a Man Oughta Know” earned her a Song of the Year trophy at the 2022 ACM Awards, where she was also crowned the New Female Artist of the Year.

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