Lainey Wilson released her long-awaited new album Whirlwind last Friday (August 23). The 14-track collection is full of high-energy songs loaded with Wilson’s swagger and attitude. Overall, it’s an upbeat record. Then, it ends with the emotional “Whiskey Colored Crayon.”

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Wilson doesn’t shy away from emotion or storytelling throughout the tracklist. However, “Whiskey Colored Crayon” is an emotional gut punch. The song tells the story of a little boy trying to draw a picture of his family. It’s all going well until he finds that he can’t draw his dad because he can’t find a whiskey-colored crayon. The picture he drew sparked a chain of events that ended with his dad getting sober.

Ahead of the album’s release, Wilson appeared on Audacy’s Katie & Company to speak with host Katie Neal about Whirlwind. During the conversation, she talked about “Whiskey Colored Crayon” and why she chose to put it at the end of the album.

Lainey Wilson on “Whiskey Colored Crayon”

While talking about songs from Whirlwind, Neal said she needed to hear the story behind the album closer. “That will linger with you for a long time. I’m glad it’s at the end of the album,” she added, saying that it’s the kind of song that you “need a minute” after hearing.

“I know. That’s kind of why we put it there. I feel like if it was in the middle of the record, it might kind of take you out of a different place than I’d like you to be listening to the rest of them,” Lainey Wilson said.  Neal pointed to the storytelling aspect of the song. “That’s another reason why I wanted to put it very last. I just wanted to end on that note. That’s why I fell in love with country music. It’s the storytelling aspect of all of it,” Wilson said.

The Story Behind the Song

Wilson then revealed that the song came from a word exercise that her co-writer Josh Keer did. “He writes random lists of things,” Wilson explained. “He might write a list of things he hates and a list of things that he loves. And ‘whiskey’ and ‘colored crayon’ ended up being like two of the things on the list of like 100 things that he wrote. He just like, paired them. That’s how he came up with [the title for] ‘Whiskey Colored Crayon’ and we developed the storyline around it,” she said.

About the people who will relate to the song, Wilson said, “There’s so many people not just like kids who go through things but the teachers. It’s a little bit of everything for somebody. There’s so many things that happen behind closed doors that people are scared to talk about or admit. The truth is, we all have issues. We all have problems. So, let’s not act like we don’t.”