There are a couple of things here that may surprise you: The fact that 2013 was 11 years ago, and that Luke Combs and Lainey Wilson’s friendship goes back that far.

In recent chats with both Combs and Wilson for Taste of Country Nights: On Demand, they’ve shared tidbits about their longstanding friendship. At the 2024 ACM Awards, the two were both up for ACM Entertainer of the Year, and when we asked Combs about Wilson, he had some big thoughts.

What Does Luke Combs Think About Lainey Wilson?

“She was just always a hustler, man,” the “Hurricane” singer recalls. “She’s always been so respected, in my opinion. We have a lot of the same mutual friends, we kind of came up in the same writing circles and hung out at the same places.”

That they did: Wilson managed to pull out a photo of when the two now-superstars met in 2013.

Wilson explains in an Instagram video how the two started kicking it as songwriters so many yeas ago.

“He used to come over to my camper-trailer and we would write music. It’s so crazy how life is a full circle,” she says, recalling how they used to write together as fresh-faced newcomers.

Now, both Wilson and Combs are megastars — they say Nashville is a 10-year-town, meaning you have to put in ten years of hustling and singing for little-to-no money, writing music that might not get recorded, before you finally get a breakthrough.

Eleven years later, both stars are riding massive success.