PLAYING by her own RULES
Country singer Miranda Lambert finds success in a format that favors male acts
When Miranda Lambert was preparing to open her Casa Rosa Tex-Mex Cantina in Tennessee last year, someone on the country singer’s team tried to persuade her to make a prominent space for the oversize birdcage she occupies in the music video for her 2019 hit “Bluebird.”
Lambert had misgivings. Jammed with memorabilia from her nearly two-decade career, the Casa Rosa is the first of Nashville’s many celebrity saloons to be branded by a female country star; as such, she was after a certain vibe.
“It had to be, like, girly,” she said. “Nashville is No. 1 for bachelorette parties … so I want them to have somewhere they can feel comfortable because it’s a female-driven bar.” She laughed. “I’m not having girls dancing in cages here.”
Lambert settled on putting the prop in a corner of the VIP balcony, mostly out of sight of any potential leering dudes, above Casa Rosa’s main stage, which is where she was rehearsing on a recent evening ahead of a launch party for her new album, “Palomino,” and an upcoming Vegas residency.
Lambert, 38, took a sip of her Tito’s-and-soda as her band eased into the loping groove of the LP’s slyly gender-bending lead single, “If I Was a Cowboy.” It’s about a woman imagining herself with the freedom of an old-timey gunslinger.
In truth, Lambert might be the freest member, male or female, of Nashville’s ruling A-list; certainly, she’s making more interesting use of her country stardom than any of the other nominees she recently beat out, Luke Combs and Carrie Underwood among them, for the Academy of Country Music’s entertainer of the year award. “Palomino,” now available, follows 2021’s Grammy-nominated “The Marfa Tapes,” a seriously stripped-down collection of love songs and drinking tunes she and a pair of fellow singer-songwriters, Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, recorded around a campfire in the Texas desert with two microphones and two acoustic guitars.
Taken in tandem with “The Marfa Tapes” — and with “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home),” Lambert’s duet with Elle King that just became the first track by two women to top Billboard’s Country Airplay chart since 1993 — “Palomino” posits that Lambert has reached a point where she’s more or less doing whatever she wants even as she’s come to a kind of fruitful understanding with the hidebound country-radio establishment that hasn’t always valued her work.
“Basically, I don’t expect too much, and they don’t either,” she said of a format that routinely marginalizes women in favor of cookie-cutter male acts.
Unlike the similarly adventurous Kacey Musgraves, Lambert hasn’t abandoned the Nashville industry; she’s still got a foot planted firmly in the biz here. But she’s clearly playing the game by her own rules, and in doing so she’s found huge success and become a key influence on the generation of country singers behind her.
“Miranda was already making it when I was just getting revved, and I remember thinking, ‘How cool is this person?’ ” said Ashley Monroe, one of Lambert’s bandmates (along with Angaleena Presley) in the Pistol Annies, with whom the singer has released four albums. “She’s beautiful. She’s feisty. She doesn’t care what anybody thinks. It’s like she made everyone realize you don’t have to be so prim and proper and delicate.”
Lambert broke out in 2005 with “Kerosene,” the revenge-minded title track from her major-label debut, after she appeared on the first season of “Nashville Star.” That TV gig is what got her signed at age 19, but by then she had already been writing songs and performing for years in honky tonks in Texas.
Having taken the baton from the Dixie Chicks and Gretchen Wilson, Lambert ran with the tough-talking act for 2007’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which spun off her first top 10 single in “Gunpowder and Lead”; soon, though, she was showcasing her flexible singing voice — dreamy and yearning, yet shot through with an essential Lone Star State honesty — in all kinds of songs, from grandly emotive ballads like “The House That Built Me” to frisky slow jams like “Fine Tune.” Lambert’s catalog might be the most consistent of any current country star’s. But nobody has taken more chances with her sound than she has.
In 2011, Lambert married Blake Shelton, then becoming a household figure thanks to his role as a coach on “The Voice,” which brought a new degree of tabloid scrutiny that registered as “a shock to my system,” Lambert said.
The couple divorced in 2015, an experience she described as “horrible — like the death of something;” the next year Lambert released an introspective double LP, “The Weight of These Wings,” which earned rave reviews and won album of the year at the ACM Awards. (Lambert remarried in 2019 to Brendan McLoughlin, a former New York City police officer she met when he provided security for a Pistol Annies performance on “Good Morning America.”)
Work on “Palomino,” Lambert’s eighth solo studio disc, began in 2020 when the singer convened a series of songwriting weekends with Natalie Hemby and Luke Dick at her farm outside Nashville; this was peak pandemic, so they channeled their pent-up wanderlust into creating “a travel record while we can’t travel,” as Lambert put it, full of made-up characters in different settings around the United States.
The ability to write from imagined perspectives was something Lambert had long admired about Guy Clark and John Prine; developing those muscles herself was both artistically and emotionally gratifying.
“I kind of learned after ‘Weight of These Wings’ that I don’t want to live everything I write about,” she said. “That’s too much life — and too much heartbreak, too.”
Still, it’s no coincidence that “Palomino” is more up than down. Lambert said she has “learned how to care for myself and to be cautious” since her
“I kind of learned after ‘Weight of These Wings’ that I don’t want to live everything I write about. That’s too much life — and too much heartbreak, too.” — Miranda Lambert
divorce. “But I’m also one of those people that loves love, and I love big. So if I believe in it, I go for it.”
She’s making more time for herself these days than she used to. “I was so into my career for so long that I feel like I was a little behind in getting to know myself outside of country music,” she said.
Reckoned Hemby: “I think she’s just kind of chilling now. This girl’s worked her (butt) off for I don’t know how long, and I think she’s starting to enjoy the journey.”
A few years ago, Lambert might have been peeved by the fact that “If I Was a Cowboy” had recently peaked (so far) at No. 16 on the airplay chart, stuck behind more widely spun — if far less inspired — singles by guys like Cody Johnson and Dustin Lynch. But then neither of them has a restaurant with his name on it or can call himself entertainer of the year.
“I set all these goals, and that award was the last one on the list,” Lambert said. “I’m like, ‘Well, that’s a freakin’ great place to be.’ ”