With “wait in the truck” headed to the top of the country charts, Hardy is sharing with ABC Audio the moment he invited Lainey Wilson on the song. That moment, as he recalls, happened swiftly and spontaneously.

“It was almost instant. I mean, once we cut the song, I remember I was sitting in the studio with Joey Moi, my producer, and Seth England, my manager, and we threw out names, of course,” Hardy says. “We’re all sitting there and I was like, ‘Should I just send this to Lainey right now?’ And they were like, ‘Yes, please!'”

Hardy’s decision to enlist Lainey wasn’t an arbitrary one. In fact, he knew from the get-go that Lainey was the perfect partner for “wait in the truck” because of her ability to convincingly portray a victim of domestic abuse.

“She is that character. And I mean that as in, like, she is so authentic that she perfectly can portray that person and so, it’s so believable,” explains Hardy. “And I knew the whole time, I was like, ‘If she does this, she’s going to kill it and she’s going to be the person that everybody around the world that hears this song is going to genuinely believe that this happened to her, and then people are going to resonate with that.’ So it was pretty much always Lainey.”

“wait in the truck” is currently in the top two on the country charts. The track is off Hardy’s latest album, the mockingbird & THE CROW. 

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