“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.” Wilson.