Songfacts®:

• Here, Hardy teams up with Lainey Wilson to recount a story of domestic violence and revenge. Hardy portrays a truck driver who picks up Wilson's character on the side of the road one night. Upon realizing her partner is abusing her, he furiously drives to the abuser's home and tells Wilson to wait in the truck. Hardy grabs his Taurus Judge revolver and shoots the dude, then calmly waits on the porch to be arrested. Though the singer pays the price with a lengthy jail sentence, he finds consolation knowing Wilson is now in a happier place and his prison cell is "hell of a lot better" than where Lainey's abuser is now. The song concludes with a choir joining the two artists to sing repeatedly, "Lord, have mercy on me."
  
  "The topic isn't talked about a lot; these are things that happen behind closed doors," Wilson noted to The Tennessean.
  
  "This one is going to start a conversation that a lot of people don't want to have, but it is our job as artists to sing about things that people are scared to talk about," Wilson added. "Domestic abuse is a fragile subject, but I hope this song brings light to a situation that is more common than we'd like to admit. For the abusers, I hope this song haunts them. For the victims, I hope they know they're not alone."
• Wilson namedropped two classic murder ballads - Garth Brooks' "The Thunder Rolls" and The Chicks' "Goodbye Earl" - as songs that inspired her performance.
• Hardy wrote "Wait In The Truck" with Hunter Phelps and Jordan Schmidt on March 18, 2021 at Schmidt's home studio. "Something very spiritual happened the day that we wrote that song," he told The Tennessean. "We just kind of looked down at our pen and paper and we looked up and the song was written, it was amazing to be a part of it. It speaks on something very important, domestic violence. At the end of the day I just really hope that this gives somebody a platform to speak out."
• Hardy and Lainey have prior history together. Both were special guests on Jason Aldean's 2021 Back in the Saddle Tour 2021 and Wilson also featured on the 2021 Hardy-curated Hixtape: Vol 2 track "Beer Song."
• Hardy and Wilson gave the first live performance of the song at Dierks Bentley's Seven Peaks Musical Festival on September 3, 2022. Both artists recreated their looks from the song's music video on stage. Hardy donned an orange prison jumpsuit and Wilson wore an auburn red wig and a white tank top.
• The song originated with a conversation between Hardy and Hunter Phelps about what they might do if someone attacked their fiancées. Hardy suggested he would get his girlfriend, Caleigh Ryan, to show him where her attacker lives, then tell her to wait in the truck.
  
  "We just kind of laughed," Hardy recalled to Billboard. "And then we had that songwriter moment where we looked at each other and we were like, 'Oh s--t. 'wait in the truck' is a good song title.'"
• Schmidt enlisted his fiancée, singer-songwriter Renee Blair, to provide the demo's female voice. She added a repeated cry of "Have mercy on me" at the back end. "The gentleman in the song that was abusive to the woman, he would probably not stop there," said Blair. "People like that tend to have a repeated pattern of inflicting that kind of pain onto many others, so I think it's like, 'Have mercy on me for ending someone's life that is potentially ruining many lives.'"
  
  When Hardy heard the demo that night, he offered Blair co-writing credit for her additional contribution.
• Hardy and Lainey Wilson took to the CMA Awards stage for their first televised performance of "Wait in the Truck" on November 9, 2022. During the ceremony, Wilson landed the New Artist of the Year and Female Vocalist of the Year prizes.
• "Wait In The Truck" won the Visual Media of the Year category at the 2023 ACM Awards. The category was previously known as Video of the Year.
• The song's visual won Music Video and Musical Event of the Year at the 2023 CMA Awards. They were two of five prizes Lainey Wilson took home from the ceremony. She also scooped Entertainer of the Year, Female Vocalist of the Year, and Album of the Year for Bell Bottom Country.
• After "Wait in the Truck" went #1 at country radio, Hardy gave Wilson a custom-made gun to celebrate the milestone.
  
  "I think it was a special moment for country music, to have a murder ballad," he explained to Taste of Country, "and kinda proves that the songs that country music was built on can still survive today. There's something really special about all that, and I just wanted to commemorate that."