RaeLynn Revisits Her Teen Years in 'Funny Girl' Video (Exclusive)

• RaeLynn reflects on her teenage years in 'Funny Girl' music video
• “I always felt loved and accepted. Sometimes I felt like the odd man out,” the country star tells PEOPLE.
• RaeLynn will hit the road with Kane Brown this summer

When RaeLynn looks at her daughter Daisy Rae, she sees herself.

“She’s a fire-eater,” the singer-songwriter told PEOPLE in a recent interview. “She is 2 and a half years old and already runs the house. And I didn't expect it to happen this quickly, but here we are.

It's a little snapshot of the big life that 30-year-old RaeLynn currently leads.

“They always say you don't know true love until you have a child,” says the “God Made Girls” singer. “And now that I'm a mother, I always ask myself: what was I doing with my life before? Right after I had my daughter, nothing mattered in the world. It all has a different purpose now because it's all with her in mind.

RaeLynn says she's also loved watching her husband Josh Davis excel as a father. “He’s such a perfect girl dad,” she said. “I’m so glad we had a girl first.”

In turn, RaeLynn's music has also grown and matured and found new purpose, as the singer/songwriter says she's constantly thinking about teaching some of the lessons she can't wait to teach her little girl one day . Take for example her current single, “Funny Girl.”

“When you're that girl sitting in the backseat trying to figure out who you are kind of in your awkward phase, you wonder if this life is possible,” says RaeLynn, who won't just go on a series of tours in the stadiums. with Kane Brown this year, but is also embarking on her own Funny Girl Tour 2024 across the United States. “And it really is, but in the moment you don't really feel it. It's not that you don't believe it. It's just that you don't know if it will ever be you.

Certainly, she says she remembers these delicate stages of her own life.

“I was the life of the party, but I wouldn’t say I was the cutest girl,” RaeLynn recalls. “But I had a lot of style. I was in sixth grade and Anne Hathaway was on the cover of Vogue and she had a cool pixie haircut, and i Really I wanted this haircut. Well, I got this haircut and ended up looking like Kate Gosselin! My favorite part is that I looked in the mirror and said, 'Damn, this is awesome.'”

She laughs at the memory. “I was popular to a certain extent, but that was because I talked a lot and always had fun,” she explains. “You have the quintessential popular girls who are the hottest. I was never one of those girls. I always hung out with weird, outcast kids because that's where I fit in. But we were popular in our own right because we were just the funniest.”

It’s this story that indirectly paves the way in the music video for “Funny Girl,” released exclusively on PEOPLE.

“[Video director] Acacia Evans and I went back and forth, and then she called me one day and said, 'Look, I don't think this song needs anything more than to tell the story of a funny girl and to show the awkwardness of this funny girl.' girl,” says RaeLynn. “When I see the girl in the video putting in her contact lenses and having to wear her glasses, that was me. I wear Coke bottle glasses. I have a negative index of 5.5 in both eyes. I can't think without my glasses.”

She says it was also important for her to show that “funny girls” can sometimes be the clumsiest, but most evolve into something even more beautiful.

“The video shows the pain, but there’s also so much beauty,” says RaeLynn. “In the video, the main character might be the one who wears glasses and wears makeup, but she's still accepted and she's still loved. She's just different. I always felt loved and accepted. I just felt like a strange person. man sometimes When we were doing these performance shots, it came full circle for me because I felt like that was exactly the story.

She concludes: “It’s exactly what I imagined when I wrote this song.”