Lainey Wilson
w/ Flatland Cavalry, Kaitlin Butts
RAC Arena
Thursday, February 26 2026
Country music is going through an extended moment in the sun this decade, as evidenced by Perth, which turned into a bustling corner of Music Row, almost as far away as anyone can possibly ever get from Nashville. An evening where cowboy hats, cowgirl boots, trucker caps, mullets, and plaid tussled for fashion domination, during which RAC Arena happily cosplayed as the biggest spit-and-sawdust dive bar in the Southern Hemisphere. The only impediment that likely halted a plethora of eighties-style huge perms was the global ban on CFCs.
With the thesis put forward in 2024 that Country’s Cool Again, by this evening’s headliner herself, the night was a near-perfect opportunity to stress test that proposal. Especially when considering that it was the first time any of the three acts had been in Western Australia or that, before this tour, the supports had never performed south of the equator.
Tulsa, Oklahoma native Kaitlin Butts was first on stage, an endearing mix of blazing sincerity combined with a mischievous, softly wicked sense of humour. Not one but two murder ballads in her setlist—check. An admission that, as a professional singer, she also loves karaoke—check. Add in a stunning cover of Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle with a raw original on familial toxicity in Blood, and the audience could almost have forgotten the deliciously dry wit of Butts’ TikTok breakout, You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead to Me).
Departing almost too soon after only six songs, Butts would return later for duet duty.
Flatland Cavalry, from Lubbock, West Texas, were up next, and they were as smooth, relaxed, and soothing as any favoured bourbon. With almost all the group in cowboy hats, guitarist Reid Dillon in double denim, lead vocalist Cleto Cordero wearing an Alamo tee, and the phrase ‘y’all’ inserted three times per minute, they did not shy away from their roots in the slightest. Often using a fiddle as the spine to their music that the other instruments could work around, the band exuded an easy charisma and authentic charm as they worked the room.
A fabulous version of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide was given to the local audience as something to recognise and hold onto, as Cordero suggested Flatland’s own compositions may only have landed in Australia with the band themselves. Though for the most part this may have been true, the quality of their own tracks shone through as if they were a beacon. Particularly, A Life Where We Work Out was a wonderfully dreamy duet with Butts, and Some Things Never Change became an extremely energetic fiddle hoedown.
The support acts had exceeded expectations delightfully, but there was no question as to whom the near-full arena had turned up for.
Introduced by a stylised video of the American West, as mustang horses galloped from the Great Plains through the Rockies to the deserts beyond, Lainey Wilson posed against the setting sun as if a jaunty old-time gunslinger, then launched directly into the instant barnstormer Whirlwind, from the eponymous album for this eponymous tour.
What followed from there was an absolute masterclass in spectacle, both in music and performance. With an impressively deep roster of material across her career already, Wilson expertly held the entire audience in her hands for the next two hours, with a setlist so tight across that timeframe she couldn’t even take the briefest moment offstage to await an encore.
As happens occasionally with Perth, this was the last stop of a world tour that had started in August last year in Phoenix, Arizona. The practised professionalism by all tonight attested to the production being a very well-oiled machine by this stage, and Wilson epitomised this razor-sharp focus equally as much as any of her band or crew did.
All songs this evening were loved by the local crowd, but Watermelon Moonshine got the first of the bigger cheers, along with the first of the audience members dancing in their seats, whilst Keep Up with Jones was an energetic and rollicking blast of a tune.
The briefest of costume changes gave way to probably the biggest set piece of the night, as Wilson’s voice soared to the anthemic Somewhere Over Laredo, the staging of which launched her ten feet above the stage and metaphorically into the clouds shown on the video behind it.
As Wilson informed the audience, it was a long way from Nashville to Perth, but for her it seemed even further from Music Row to her hometown of Baskin, Louisiana. At this point, the singer was alone on stage, with an acoustic guitar, sitting on a bench as if around a campfire. A rural village of less than two hundred souls, a tough place by Wilson’s account, Baskin had inspired the next piece, the soulful and quite devastating Whiskey Colored Crayon.
Based in Nashville for the past fifteen years, the first ten of which she admitted whooped her butt, Wilson advised that in this decade all her dreams had come true right before her eyes. She acknowledged how blessed she had been, and it was wonderful to observe how she treated her band, crew, and support acts with the utmost respect and care. Both in the studio and on tour, Wilson had surrounded herself with people she loved, who reflected all the belief the artist held for them right back to her.
A superstar in the making—if not now, then certainly very soon—Wilson’s ability to tell a story, her heart, and sheer force of personality turned even the clunkiest lyric or genre cliché into spun gold. Country is, indeed, cool again, and, with Wilson as one of its current stewards, it is in amazingly capable hands for the years ahead.
As Butts, Flatland, and Wilson return to the heartland—Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee, their next performances, respectively—when they next cast their thoughts down under, whenever that may be, Perth will welcome them all with the most open of arms.