Hardy + Lainey Wilson Take Home Collaborative Video of the Year at the CMT Awards
Hardy and Lainey Wilson reunited onstage at the 2023 CMT Music Awards on Sunday night (Apr. 2.) They won Collaborative Video of the Year for their song, "Wait in the Truck."
"Man, it's so hard not to cuss," Hardy said with a chuckle accepting the award.
"You got it, you can do it," Wilson said, reassuring her duet partner with a pat on the shoulder.
"This is incredible," he continues. "I remember the day that Jordan Schmidt that I wrote the song with sent me back the demo for this song, I sat down and I was so inspired that I wrote the entire script, if you will, for the entire video because of how powerful I knew this song would be."
"I just gotta say I'm so proud to be a small part of this song," Wilson shares. "When I heard the song, I tell ya, I felt like this is an opportunity for people who have been through this to feel like they're not alone and an opportunity for the people who have been doing this - don't even get me started."
The winning video beat out Elle King and Dierks Bentley's "Worth a Shot, Ingrid Andress and Sam Hunt's "Wishful Drinking," Kane Brown and Katelyn Brown's "Thank God," Midland and Jon Pardi's "Longneck Way to Go," Russell Dickerson and Jake Scott's "She Likes It" and Thomas Rhett and Katy Perry's "Where We Started."
Hardy and Wilson's murder ballad duet tells a more chilling story than any other single on country radio, and the music video for the song is equally spooky. The clip is essentially a visual version of the story laid out in the lyrics, with Hardy playing the part of a guy driving through a small town in the middle of the night when he encounters a woman -- played by Wilson -- along the road. It's clear she's been abused by a partner , and when he picks her up, he simply asks her where her abusive partner is. Then, he goes to that location and kills the man, sitting on his porch and waiting for the police to show up and arrest him. The rest of the video is filled with snapshots of Hardy in prison, with Wilson appearing in court to testify.
"Wait in the Truck" comes off the country side of Hardy's half-country, half-hard rock album, The Mockingbird & the Crow, which came out in January.
The 2023 CMT Music Awards aired on Sunday (Apr. 2) live from Austin, Texas on CBS. It streamed live and on demand on Paramount+. Kelsea Ballerini and Kane Brown co-hosted the show.