Anne Wilson On Faith, Country Music and Her New Album: 'Jesus Was a Rebel'

Anne Wilson has a message for fans of her Christian music: She’s not abandoning the faith-centric genre.
She is, though, leaning into country music more than ever. Her sophomore album, Rebel (April 19), leads with a fast-paced country tune and includes a country flare throughout most of the 16 tracks, including several -- God and Country, for example -- that sound like they were written with pickup trucks in mind. The album cover features Wilson in a cowboy hat.
Wilson, though, is rejecting labels.
“A lot of people are labeling it as country and I would label it as just Anne Wilson,” she told CrosswalkHeadlines. “Some songs will be on Christian playlists, and some will be on country. And then some will maybe just be in the middle. ...This album was very interesting, because it really does blend the two together in one.”
Wilson became a mainstay on the Christian charts with her breakout song My Jesus and has appeared on Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs chart more than a dozen times.
Rebel, though, has gained mainstream country attention. She received a CMT Music Award nomination in the Breakthrough Female Video of the Year category for her song Rain In The Rearview. Earlier this year, CMT named her to its 2024 class of the CMT Next Women of Country. Fourteen female artists made the cut.
Wilson -- who grew up listening to both country and Christian music -- says she wants the album to reach country fans who don’t attend church.
“With this record, I felt really called to just preach the gospel point blank, share the truth, it is what it is,” Wilson told CrosswalkHeadlines. “There are a couple of songs on the record that will be on country radio that maybe don't specifically talk about God … but it's like a nod at it. My goal is to get people to hear the song and them want to know more.”
The new album includes collaborations with Chris Tomlin, Jordan Davis and Lainey Wilson.
Wilson hopes the album’s faith-fused title track, Rebel, inspires Christians to live out their faith.
“That was a really fun song for me to write,” she said. “I had had this moment of my career just feeling I was too country for Christian -- like, my songs were just not being played on Christian radio, because they were too country. But yet the message was Christian and it honestly fired me up to go, ‘You know what? I'm not going to please Christian music. And I'm not going to try to change who I am to please country music, I'm going to just be authentically who I am.’ And so it fired me up to go write a song about what it means to be a rebel.”
Christians in today’s world, she said, are, in a sense, rebels.
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