‘Just gonna have fun’
‘Mass-appeal artist’
Lambert’s rise to the top of the country-music world began in earnest in 2003 with a third-place finish on “Nashville Star,” a reality singing competition that premiered that season on USA Network. A decade later, she’s still grateful. “I think I’d be about seven years behind if I didn’t have ‘Nashville Star,’ ” she says. “I think I would be getting here, but I think I would have had to put in five more years in honkytonks, and I definitely didn’t want to do that. So I’m very, very thankful that I had the opportunity to get seen by the people I got to get seen by.
“There’s so much talent that comes out of these reality shows. And people will say what they will about them. But if any one of those people who cut it down had had the opportunity, they would jump at it. There’s an easier way now than there used to be, playing bars for 10 years hoping somebody from a label walks in. Sometimes they never do.”
“Kerosene,” a major-label debut, arrived in 2005, the title track becoming Lambert’s first Top 20 entry on the country charts. Three more Top 20 singles — “Famous in a Small Town,” “Gunpowder & Lead” and “More Like Her” — followed when Lambert released a second album called “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” in 2007. But she really came into her own as a force to be reckoned with on 2009’s “Revolution.”
“My first Number 1 came off that record,” she says. “And I think that first Number 1 sort of gave me a kick in the ass, for lack of a better word. It was like ‘All right. I got my first Number 1.’ And I think people sort of got behind me a little more after that.”
To Kevin Mannion, the music director at Valley country outlet KNIX-FM (102.5), there’s no real mystery involved in Lambert’s rise to fame, much less her staying power.
“She’s obviously a mass-appeal artist,” he says. “The guys want to date her, and the girls want to hang out with her. And obviously, she’s on a hot streak. She’s with Blake, whose star couldn’t burn any brighter at the moment, and she’s an A-list artist on her own accord. She keeps putting out credible music. And she’s a pretty girl.
“But she’s got that chip on her shoulder/attitude that I think a lot of females can identify with. So she’s really broad female appeal. And the guys who like country music, she’s certainly got a little grit to her.”
“Annie Up,” Lambert’s second album with the Pistol Annies, arrived last week. And her upcoming concert at Desert Sky Pavilion will feature a Pistol Annies set.
“When we first got together,” she says of the group she formed with Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe in 2011, “we really didn’t know what was gonna happen or what to expect. But now that we’ve finished our second album and it’s almost out, it’s really kind of surreal because we knew deep down that we would always want to make records together, but it’s starting, you know what I mean? This is showing that we’re not just a little one-album band, that it wasn’t just a little side project that went away.”
She’s also getting ready to record her much-anticipated follow-up to “Four the Record.”
“I’m going into the studio in August to make my fifth solo album,” she says. “And I think I’m just gonna have fun because I’ve been serious a lot. I’ve written songs about killing people and sad songs, and I really want to do a tour that’s just a lot of fun, so I want to do an album with more fun songs. And I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’ll definitely have my serious Miranda Lambertstyle songs, but everything I’m listening to now that I’m liking is kind of a jam that you could listen to driving around on back roads or on your boat.”
So is there something in particular that she’s been spinning while driving around on those back roads?
Lambert answers like she’s one-half of a country-music power couple.
“This might sound really cheesy,” she says with a laugh. “But I really love Blake’s new record. It’s fun. And I think that’s one thing that got me thinking about that. He’s such a fun guy. It’s like he’s constantly waiting, on edge, to laugh at every turn.”
Lambert laughs then adds, “And that’s how his record is. So I’m kind of inspired by that.”