The Masked Singer has crowned its season 13 winner — and she’s ready to show the world that there’s more to see under her shell.
This post contains spoilers for The Masked Singer season 13 finale.
During the Wednesday, May 7, finale, Pearl — revealed as country singer Gretchen Wilson — took home the Golden Mask Trophy, beating out fellow finalists Mad Scientist Monster (Brian Kelley), Coral (Meg Donnelly) and Boogie Woogie (Andy Grammer).
“It meant the world, obviously,” Wilson, 51, exclusively told Us Weekly of her win on Wednesday. “I mean, it’s grueling. It’s a hard schedule. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of on your feet, it’s a lot of choreography, dancing. I’ve never been known to be good at that!”
The Grammy winner noted that she had an even steeper learning curve for dancing given that she suffered a debilitating leg injury not long before filming the Fox competition series.
Gretchen Wilson. Jason Kempin/Getty Images
“I destroyed my left leg, and I was in a wheelchair for eight months with a cast,” she recalled, noting that she was still wearing a boot until about six months before shooting started. “That was probably the scariest part for me, was, ‘Can I put on these boots? Can I get up and down those stairs with the extra weight? Can I do these little dance moves?’ It’s not much, but for me, it was pretty challenging. … At the end of each day, I was just like, ‘Man, I made it through another day. I can keep doing this.’ And so after a few days of being on set, I was like, ‘I’m going all the way!’”
In addition to challenging herself, Wilson wanted to challenge her fans to see a different side of her beyond the “Redneck Woman” they met back in 2004. That meant performing songs from all across the spectrum of genre, from Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You” to Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” and Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.”
Who is that? It’s the question asked by panelists on The Masked Singer multiple times in each episode, and the answer is: everybody. Since the show debuted in January 2019, the celebrity contestants have included Joey Fatone, Michelle Williams, Tori Spelling, Mickey Rourke, Patti LaBelle, Kelly Osbourne, Bret Michaels, Lil Wayne, Jordyn Woods, Wendy Williams, […]
“There is a lot more to me,” Wilson told Us. “I’m not just a singer. I’m a songwriter, I’m a producer, I’m a musician. I play, I make records — I don’t just sing on them. And I’m more than just a beer-guzzling, whiskey-drinking, four-wheel-riding, shotgun-toting [person]. There are different sides to me. And I think so many people out there just think, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s that redneck girl, the hell-yeah girl with the baby on her hip.’ Well, OK. But there’s also a lot of depth. I listen to lots of different kinds of music and I’ve grown up some. There’s a lot of layers to this onion.”
The “All Jacked Up” singer noted that the Pearl costume itself helped her get into character, largely because its glittery, glamorous vibe was so different from the “black tank top, blue jeans and cowboy boots” she usually sports for shows.
“I got to become the alternate side of myself, the side that I don’t get to show people. And it’s not that I don’t get to, it’s that that’s not what they bought a ticket to. They wanna see the thing that they’re expecting to see,” she explained. “Pearl was polite, she was humble, she was patient, she was supportive. She was kind, and not that I’m not all of those things, but she just easily exuded that sort of giddy, girly [energy]. … I felt like I turned into this goddess woman that is so not like me.”
While fans haven’t gotten a full-length Wilson album since 2017, it sounds like they’ll be seeing a lot more of her after her Masked Singer victory. She told Us she’s working on a rerecorded version of her debut album, Here for the Party, à la Taylor Swift, and she hopes it’ll be out by late June.
“Mine’s gonna be different in that I’m gonna have a guest artist on each track, someone different on each track with me,” she teased. “I’ve got a few confirmed already, but I don’t really wanna say who until we get everything lined out.”
She’ll also be appearing alongside Keith Urban on the new series The Road, which is produced by Blake Shelton and follows up-and-coming artists as the open for Urban, 57, at venues across America.
“If anybody thinks it’s gonna be another run-of-the-mill, typical, everyday contestant show, it’s not,” she said. “They’re not doing it in some real fancy little hotel. You’re not gonna get to sleep in a nice bed every night. This is what it’s like. You really wanna make it? Because this is how you’re gonna sleep. You’re never gonna sleep in a bed that’s sitting still. It’s gonna be going 75 miles an hour down an interstate. If you don’t learn how to sleep like that, you’re not gonna sleep. This is the real road. This is what it’s really like to be on tour, and this is what it’s like to stand up in front of a different audience that may not necessarily be there for you each night.”
As the “tour manager,” Wilson grew so close with the cast that they started calling her the “tour momager,” and she did her best to impart her hard-earned wisdom.
“Just really readying them, getting them ready for their performance, getting their head in the right place, making sure that they’re taking care of themselves, being good to themselves,” she explained. “It takes a lot of sleep and a lot of shutting up to do this job.”
The Masked Singer is available to stream on Hulu.
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