“Out of Oklahoma” singer Lainey Wilson isn’t from the OK state, but she knows a thing or two about uncomfortably going ho-o-o-o-o-o-ome, as she sings in the summer action movie “Twisters.”
“I didn’t live out a lot of the things that Kate did in the movie,” she says of the onetime tornado chaser played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, “but I know what it’s like going home and having that heartbreak, and it’s like a bittersweet feeling of having a love-hate relationship with the place that you’re from.”
The music team for Lee Isaac Chung’s “Twisters” told the seven-time CMA honoree and recent Grammy nominee it was considering going with modern country songs for the entire soundtrack. “I was like, ‘Sign me up.’ And then we went out to L.A., and they showed me the specific scene where Kate was driving home. And to tell you the truth, I felt like I could see myself in Kate a lot.”
She hunkered down with co-writers Luke Dick and Shane McAnally for their first collaboration, and what emerged was “Out of Oklahoma,” a simple, wistful country song built on a gentle pun (“Can’t take the ‘home’ out of Okla-hom-a / So you can’t take it out of me”) that accompanies Kate’s return from New York City. Wilson says they wrote a couple of songs, but “Out of Oklahoma” was definitely the one: “I felt like when I was closing my eyes and I was picturing that scene they showed me, I just felt like it was coming specifically from Kate.”
Lainey Wilson with guitar
(Leslie Andrews/for the Times)
Wilson hails from the tiny village of Baskin (current population around 210, though she says it was about 180 when she lived there), tucked in the northeast corner of Louisiana. Having mixed feelings about going home isn’t all she shares with Kate, a weather expert returning to her native state — specifically to a notorious area nicknamed “Tornado Alley” for the frequency of those deadly events.
Wilson says Baskin isn’t subject to the worst pounding Louisiana gets from hurricanes, but “we have had lots of tornadoes roll through. I mean, my mama and daddy, they even have a storm shelter at their house because there was a 10-year stretch where it seemed like we were just having tornadoes out of the blue. My family has had to step in and help people. It’s been really cool to watch how my family takes action when a natural disaster happens. It teaches you a lot about life and it teaches you what’s really important.”
The song she co-wrote for “Twisters” is built on a simple, repeating, arpeggiated riff on its two main chords, generating a contemplative sound, evoking a long drive on a flat, open highway. The first line is, “I’ve been dreamin’ / I’ve been drivin’.”
From left, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos and Glen Powell in the movie “Twisters”
(Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures and Amblin Entertainment)
“When I saw that scene of her coming back, I’m like, man, a lot happens when you got a lot of time to sit there and think when you’re driving down the road. A lot of emotions,” Wilson says. “I lived in a camper trailer in Nashville for the first three years I was there. And I would go home to Baskin; I remember just being in the car a lot with my guitar in the back.
“Sometimes you’re so deep in thought that you’re like, ‘Man, I don’t even remember passing that Taco Bell, but I guess I did,’ because you were so deep into whatever it is that had you all wrapped up. And so I knew that’s the mind-set that we needed to put her in.
“I could go all around the world, but I know who I am. I know where I come from, and my people know me better than I know myself, and I always have a place I can come back to. And so that’s how that happened.”
Kate can’t avoid that nostalgic feeling on returning, but she’s also back with a mission: to try to apply a radical scientific solution to the deadly tornadoes. The song isn’t about that epic confrontation, but it contains hints of what’s to come, with references to Kate being “a wild wind blowin’ / just a-rollin’ like a tumbleweed” and the song’s hook, that vocal run in the chorus, spiraling down: “Can’t take the ho-o-o-o-o-o-ome out of Oklahoma / It’s where my soul-o-o-o-o-o-oul was born to be.”
“When it fell out, I was driving down the road and I was just like, there was something that just felt like the descending part of it,” she says. “I did it without really even thinking about it. And it’s like the more that we sang it, the more I realized, ‘Dang, if a tornado could sound like anything, I would put that melody to it.’ So I felt like it was just kind of swirling around.”