Country star Miranda Lambert might have a better show when she’s angry
Miranda Lambert is happy.
You can read it in the headlines, hear it on her new album and see it on her face, which seemed to be smiling from ear to ear during most of her show Friday at the SAP Center in San Jose.
Yes, after a very messy and painfully public split with fellow country music star Blake Shelton in 2015, Lambert has found love with Brendan Mcloughlin, a New York City police officer whom she married after a whirlwind romance that began just over a year ago. And she seems to be walking on sunshine these days.
Not surprisingly, her gig Friday had a very different vibe than her Northern California outing two years ago in Sacramento.
Lambert — a future Country Music Hall of Famer — was fighting mad at that earlier show, clobbering her demons, shaking off the blues and mending a broken heart as she belted out songs from 2016’s emotionally raw breakup album, “The Weight of These Wings.”
There was none of that going on in San Jose, as she just contently grinned and crooned through a relatively laid-back performance in support of her upbeat new album, “Wildcard.”
The result was still a mostly enjoyable show, although one that was not nearly as powerful or cathartic as what was witnessed in Sacramento.
Lambert is even taking time to stop and smell the roses and act like a tourist while on this Wildcard Tour. Notably, she made a trek over to San Jose’s most famous attraction — the Winchester Mystery House — before she played the SAP Center gig.
“It was incredible,” Lambert told fans of her visit to the iconic site. “Our tour guide said, ‘Instead of thinking of (Sarah Winchester) as crazy, you should think of her as smart.’
“I think she was a little bit of both,” Lambert concluded.
The roughly 90-minute show got off to a slow start. Lambert seemed to be running on cruise control as she took the stage and delivered a lackluster version of the new album’s “White Trash.” But maybe that wasn’t so unusual after all, given that “White Trash” isn’t a very good song to begin with.
More surprising, however, was that she couldn’t light much of a fire with “Kerosene,” the title track to her terrific major label debut of 2005.
The first third of the show was remarkably low in energy, and Lambert didn’t do much to interact with the crowd until seven songs into the 23-tune set, eventually chiming in with an obligatory “How’s everybody doing in San Jose tonight?”
Things eventually took a turn for the better when Lambert and her solid ninepiece backing band latched onto a rocking, uptempo cover of John Prine’s fun “That’s the Way That the World Goes ’Round,” which was followed by a faithful rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Say You Love Me” and then her own beloved ballad “The House That Built Me.”
“Thank you for singing along,” the singer-songwriter told the crowd. “That just shows me that we do have some true country music fans in the house.”
A few offerings later, Lambert finally took the evening to where it needed to be and reached the heights found at that Sacramento show in 2018, as she tore through three consecutive winners — “Only Prettier,” “Gunpowder and Lead” and “Mama’s Broken Heart.”
She gave that trio of songs all she had, soundly reminding fans of why she’s rightfully considered to be one of the country music genre’s all-time greats.