The CMA Awards will be airing tonight (November 8 at 8 p.m.), but country music’s biggest award show has revealed a few early winners ahead of the event. In the category of Musical Event of the Year, HARDY and Lainey Wilson won for their collaboration on “wait in the truck,” as well as the award for Music Video of the Year.
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Joey Moi, Jordan Schmidt, and Derek Wells also take home the win for producing “wait in the truck,” and Justin Clough for directing the music video. The announcement came early this morning hours before the CMA Awards will take place.
HARDY and Wilson’s collaboration has already won the CMT award for Collaborative Music Video of the Year, the ACM award for Music Event of the Year, and won Music Video of 2023 at the People’s Choice Country Awards. Now, the pair can add a CMA to that list, and maybe more awards in the future.
Wilson also recently mentioned how her song “Heart Like a Truck” is related to “wait in the truck,” stating that the character she plays in the collaboration is the same character in her song. Initially, there was hesitation from Wilson’s team about releasing two songs with “truck” in the title one right after the other, but Wilson latched onto the powerful story that HARDY pitched her.
“[Both songs] go hand in hand,” she said. “When you hear the story behind ‘Wait in the Truck,’ the girl has a heart like a truck to get through it. It’s all one in the same story.”
“Heart Like a Truck” was released as a single as part of Wilson’s 2022 album, Bell Bottom Country. “It was one of those things where I think a lot of people during that time were trying to cover up the way that they were feeling during the pandemic, and we were trying to do that at first when we were writing the song,” Wilson said of the song. “We stopped ourselves because we’re very honest with each other and we said, ‘Are we being honest with where we’re at right now in this situation?’ And the truth was, we weren’t. So we started getting vulnerable with it and it was really coming from a real place.”
While Wilson wasn’t involved in the writing process on “wait in the truck,” HARDY seems to have come from that same honest, vulnerable place when writing the award-winning track. The two songs are similar in their resilience and strong characters, which helped propel them to the top of the Billboard charts and into the hearts of country music fans everywhere.
