Nikki Lane Releases 'DIY' Music Video About 'Female Empowerment' for Song 'Denim and Diamonds' (Exclusive)

Not only can Nikki Lane buy her own damn denim and diamonds, she can make her own damn music video.

While bringing the visuals for her song "Denim and Diamonds" — the title track of her fourth studio album released last September — to life, the singer, 39, says she took a "DIY" approach with everything from the set to the casting to the styling.

"We were able to make the music video in one day here in Los Angeles in a little studio where they've made a bunch of rooms look like '70s households," Lane tells PEOPLE. "To come up with all of those different vignettes and bring all of my girlfriends into the scene for the video was really fun."

Co-directed by Lane's boyfriend Wade Crescent and Chase Manhattan, who also run the L.A. honky-tonk Desert 5 Spot together, the music video depicts Lane as a '70s superstar, imparting her wisdom to young women through several different TV performances.

"We had been talking about the principal of this video being female empowerment, and my partner [Wade] had heard my manager and me going over how we would shoot, and he pitched, 'What about all the young Nikkis? All the young girls that look up to Nikki? What if we went at that approach?'" Lane recalls.

Lane went ahead with the idea, casting young women she knew for the music video. The little girl in the music video is her manager Zoe's daughter Gia, while one of the teens is Camille Homme, the daughter of the guitarist on the track, Josh Homme. The last woman in the video is Coco Samone, a close friend of Crescent and Manhattan's.

While watching the women in the different scenes, "I was seeing moments of my real childhood there, even in the crusty carpet in the room where the teenagers are," Lane says with a laugh. "Aside from the fact that I didn't own a record player when I was a teenager — I had a Walkman."

Along with styling herself, Lane also styled each of the four young women in the video.

"We were able to preview the space and know what we were going for and then start leaning into the characters," she says. "I've always been really proud of the fact that I have a diverse style in the sense that I can open up for country bands, I can open up for rock bands, and I've got the clothes to play all the parts while still being authentic to myself. So it was really fun to dig everything out. I told the two teens they had to be in their socks for the video, and one of them had a mismatched pair, and she was like, 'Oh no, my socks don't match.' I was like, 'That's perfect!'"

While most of the pieces featured in the video are from Lane's vintage clothing store High Class Hillbilly in Nashville, she was also gifted some corduroy by Wrangler and borrowed some "sparkly pieces" from her friend and fellow singer Sierra Ferrell.

"From a DIY perspective, you have to ask for favors in your community," she says. "It is very inspiring to me that I have that community of people. If you look at older videos of mine, like 'Highway Queen,' we literally run over cars in a monster truck that belongs to a family member; just a friend of my cousin or whatever. I would've never been able to afford to crush cars with a monster truck. I just have family friends that would gather in the yard and celebrate getting to do something wild like that. And that's been a pillar of my career: having people that want to also lean in."

Another person who leaned in for the music video was Lane's friend Renee who owns Black Leaf florals in L.A.

"I called her right away and said, 'Can you decorate this room?'" she says. "Because studio sets are pretty lackluster, even though there's a lot of good baseline to work with. So Wade and I were in there very early that morning and the night prior just playing Tetris. By wearing many hats, it makes it a pretty stimulating experience and lets us get a lot more bang for our buck."

For her own styling, Lane — who worked in fashion before she started writing music — went for a "country Nikki for Gia, a rock and roll Nikki for the teens and a more Cher-inspired Nikki for the Coco scene," she says. "It was fun to play dress up."

One outfit Lane particularly had a blast in was the long, blue feather Catherine D'Lish evening gown that she purchased new as an investment piece.

"That was a splurge piece for me that I've now found a few shoots to have it used for to make it worth the investment, but it's such a beautiful piece," she says. "I know where it was made, I know who it supported."

Like with her music video looks, quality is always at the top of Lane's mind when looking for items to add to High Class Hillbilly's inventory.

"We were recently at a show, I think in North Carolina, and a girl came in, and she had on a fringe jacket and said, 'I got this jacket from your store. It's a bummer it has a rip in it,'" she recalls. "With older things, the seam might dry rot or whatever. I was like, 'Well, just bring it, and we'll sew it up for you.' It's not something we do all the time, but I wanted her to love and keep wearing that jacket. Sure enough, I got home from tour, and the jacket was in the shop for repair. We stand behind the fact that even though it's old, I want you to keep wearing it. We can wear these things into the ground. We've just got to keep touching them up."

"Things were so much better made back in the day because they were lower production volume," she adds. "Plus, we just hadn't really found fast fashion yet as a manufacturing staple. I definitely have become more conscious of the fact that if it's not ethically made, we shouldn't be running around loving our outfit if it was at the expense of somebody's livelihood."

During Stagecoach weekend kicking off in Indio, California, on April 28, Lane will be back on site as the festival's vintage supplier with her Stage Stop Marketplace. She also runs her own music lineup there at the Horseshoe Stage.

"I'm able to invite so many vendors," says Lane, who also was the vintage supplier at the Palomino Festival in Los Angeles last July. "It's all because of one woman — Stacy Vee — who gave me an opportunity to do a little thing that slowly has grown into something that generates a bunch of money for our shop, but then gives us a chance to interact with fans on a two-tier level. It's fun to see fans walk around in a fringe outfit that I bought in Illinois when I sold eight tickets that night or something."

Lane says talks for this year's marketplace and stage started about a month after last year's Stagecoach ended.

"It's a year in the making," she says. "I listen to every submission, and this year there were about 150 submissions for music. We did the Battle of the Bands for the last slot, and I had to pick someone live. The first couple years of doing it I had to ask favors. We had some repeat artists for the first few years just because I was struggling to explain to people what Stagecoach was, and that they would have a good time. Now we're having some very large bands as the headliners. I'm really excited to see Lola Kirke."

Through the years, Lane says she's also taken note of one of the marketplace's hottest-selling items: socks.

"People are ill-prepared when they're out there!" she says. "So I've just really tried to lean in and make sure that we, from a market perspective, take care of all the things people might need when they're out there. The marketplace is meant to introduce country fashion to someone who's coming out to explore Stagecoach as a first-time visitor, and I want to help them cowboy it up for the weekend. But I also want to let clothes addicts like myself find additional outfits."

Beyond Stagecoach, Lane will be keeping busy this month on her headlining tour and by supporting Chris Stapleton on some of his dates.

"Chris Stapleton, to me, is the biggest, most successful, most generous artist in our genre, which I would call the Americana side of country music," Lane says. "His sense of family trickles down to the way he treats his band, and that trickles down to the way his band and staff treat us as guests. We've just always felt really spoiled to be in that environment. I actually filled in some slots last year when someone couldn't show up — I got to go to Canada within eight hours of being asked to do a few shows, and I joked, 'Hopefully I'll get a few more next year.' They gave me a stack of dates, and it just showed that they really look out for their people."

Earlier this year, Stapleton and his wife Morgane even gifted Lane a custom Princeton reverb with a Filson cover chain stitched with a whitetail deer, the deer most common in Lane's hometown of Greenville, South Carolina.

"It was a Christmas present, and I just felt so tickled because of the amount of detail," she says. "It really showed me how kind Morgane and Chris are. And that beyond success, that's what you want. You want to maintain a sense of self and a sense of kindness if you get that big. They're kind of my benchmark that I may never reach, because nobody else has, but man, they're such a cool family."

When she hits the stage this month, Lane says she can't wait to see her fans sing the lyrics to songs on Denim and Diamonds live.

"This record was probably my most reflective, or is my most reflective record, so when people embrace it and find their own meanings behind it or take it on as their own mantra, it's a big deal to me," she says. "I think that early on, I was writing just for myself as a songwriter or to process things. Going out on tour and meeting people and hearing their personal stories made me see, 'Oh, they used "All or Nothing" as a way to process their divorce. Oh, they used "Highway Queen" as a way to get through their own career struggles.' It didn't occur to me the way I was sharing might impact people. So now, more than ever, I can see it's all about being open and vulnerable, because so many of us are the same."

Seeing men in the audience belting "Denim and Diamonds" also never gets old. "I'm like, 'Hell yeah!'" Lane says.

With her home, her pets and her partner, Lane is happy to describe this time in her life as "stable," though she hasn't lost her affinity for being "wild." As she looks to the future, she says she's focused on "growth."

"For me, I've come across and experienced so many things that I never even expected, but I still have big goals," she says. "I've realized I do some things because I love them, and I do some things because they make me money, but I do all things because I feel compelled to keep moving forward."

One of the things Lane says she'd like to work on is finding the "balance in work versus home life."

"Wade and I definitely do our best to juggle fun," she says. "Most of the time we have fun at work, and since I'm on tour from the 12th of the month until Stagecoach, we're definitely taking all those days off in between. I feel like when you're in this business, you have to find the little sweet spots in between."