Audacy Country stations are excited to shine a light on the best emerging artists in music with LAUNCH. Meet Stephen Wilson Jr., a singer who is still only showing the first layer of his talent, and the latest Audacy’s LAUNCH artist.
Find your favorite station on the free Audacy app
Already nominated for Best New Artist at the CMA Awards in 2025, Wilson Jr.'s star started to rise before he even released his first song to Country radio. It's not the most traditional path to success, but what would you expect from the former boxer and scientist. Stephen has seen a lot, and those observations on everyday life have fueled his song, "Gary." Hear it now and get to know more about the rising Country star on your favorite Audacy Country station.
"Gary is more of a metaphor. A garyotype, so to speak," Stephen told Katie Neal earlier this year. "I started to basically think of Gary as a subspecies, a human, like a Gary as an organism, not so much just a name for a person because it was to me more of a stereotype," he frames it scientifically. "If you could classify that organism, how would you do that? That's that's how I approach Gary is almost like how Jane Goodall would approach a chimpanzee or something, kind of like studying the Garys in the wild because, you know, the Garys are going extinct."
"The Garys are very important. Gary important," he jokes. "Every Gary I know just knows how to fix something. They're just kind of born with this kind of natural mechanical inclination, so to speak. So I went around the world and basically had this hypothesis about the Garys, and every laboratory, I'd have someone come up like, 'I know exactly who you're talking about.'"
"If you can show me like a 10-year-old Gary, that's the the challenge I give to the audience. Present him to me, and we will bubble wrap him."
Don't miss "Gary" from Stephen Wilson Jr., now playing on your favorite Audacy Country station, and find more music you should know at audacy.com/launch.