Lainey Wilson and her fiancé, Devlin “Duck” Hodges, are deep into planning their wedding after announcing their engagement earlier this year. While chatting on the Like A Farmer Podcast, Hodges opened up about his future wife and the exact moment he realized Wilson was the woman he wanted to spend his life with.
Host Pat Spinosa asked him point-blank if he knew right away, “Hey, I’m gonna marry that girl.” Hodges didn’t hesitate. He said he genuinely did—and that the moment happened almost immediately after they met.
He recalled pulling into Wilson’s driveway for one of their first dates. “It was nighttime, freezing February, and there were deer in the yard,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Hell yeah.’ And when she opened the door, I just thought, ‘This is it.’ We definitely had that moment.”
Hodges then talked about Wilson’s music and revealed that her song “Yesterday, All Day, Every Day”—a track on the deluxe version of her latest album, Whirlwind—is actually about their very first date.
“She’s got a whole song about it,” he said. “For our first date, I drove to Nashville and picked her up. We had dinner at Moby Dicky’s in Hendersonville, right on the water. Great spot. Then we went to this bar that closed down about a month later—and you’ll see why.”
He described the place as a simple setup: “Five bucks a person, all-you-can-drink beer, all-you-can-drink wine, and line dancing. That was it.”
Hodges laughed as he explained that he, Wilson, and about ten of her friends kept going back—maybe a little too often.
“We might’ve been the reason it shut down,” he joked. “From our first date until the place closed, we went four or five times. And if the beer’s free, you’re not stopping at five—you’re drinking fifteen, twenty. That was our first Nashville date, starting at Moby Dicky’s.”
Fast-forward to February 2025, Hodges proposed, and when Wilson shared the big news online, fans went wild.
“When we first started dating almost five years ago, we kept things really quiet for the first two years,” Hodges said. “Eventually we went public—hate that term, but that’s what happened. And when I proposed, it turned into a pretty big deal.”
Even with all the excitement, the couple isn’t rushing wedding prep. Wilson told PEOPLE in August that she planned to start looking for her dress soon—and she hopes the final look makes Hodges emotional.
“I’m excited to step out of my comfort zone and see what happens,” she said. “Hopefully when he sees me, he’ll be bawling.”
The Louisiana singer also praised her fiancé, calling him her “biggest cheerleader.”
“He thinks the sky’s the limit with everything,” she said. “He’s my home. I’m lucky to have him—and I think he’s pretty dang lucky to have me, too.”