Lainey Wilson has built a reputation as one of country music’s biggest stars, but Kaitlin Butts says what impressed her most about touring with Wilson happened completely behind the scenes.
Butts recently joined Wilson on the road for an arena tour, and she admits her band wasn’t exactly set up for that level of production. They were used to playing smaller clubs and venues where they could use the house equipment.
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Butts told me during an interview on Taste of Country Nights, “We’re a monitor band. And if you don’t know what that means, like, we play small clubs, venues, and where we have the speakers pointing at our face.”
Butts explained to me how Wilson’s crew called about a week before the arena tour started and asked what kind of monitor board Butts’ band had.
“I was like, ‘We don’t have a board. We have the in-house monitor engineer that, you know, runs down on the side,’” Butts said.
That could have created a pretty big problem for a smaller act suddenly stepping onto an arena tour. They just weren’t fully equipped to join such a large-scale production and look like they belonged at the same time… instead, Wilson stepped in.
“A couple of days later, they’ve let us know that Lainey is going to take care of that for us,” Butts said.
And that was just the beginning.
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Butts says she was willing to lose money just for the opportunity to be part of the tour, but Wilson made sure she had the people she needed to actually put on the show.
“I was going to go in the deficit just to be on that [tour], because of the monitor and because I didn’t have a front of house manager, she let me use her front of house manager, her light guy, her in-ear monitor person, and paid for it.”
That’s a pretty incredible thing to do for another artist, especially when you’re already running a massive tour of your own.
Butts says Wilson’s generosity showed her something about the kind of person she is when nobody is watching.
“She just helped me so much. That just shows how she’s just trying to reach back behind her and help the person that’s next in line in every kind of way, but behind the scenes help.”
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What makes this story even better is what Butts told me next.
She said, “I know that she [Wilson] probably would even, she wouldn’t even like that I probably said it.”
Wilson wasn’t doing it for attention. She was simply helping a friend and fellow artist get through a tour that was a much bigger production than what Butts was used to.
And according to Butts, that kind of behind-the-scenes help says a lot more about Wilson than anything she could say or do onstage.
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