The Evolution Of Miranda Lambert

When choosing songs for her own album, Lambert hung onto some of the clear-eyed perspective of the outsider. That’s a good thing, says Liddell: “The tendency [on Music Row] is to pick up a lyric sheet and see who wrote it. You see who wrote it and you go, ‘This can’t be good,’ or ‘This has gotta be a hit,’ without listening to the song. And I think Miranda is just able to listen to the song. I don’t think her mentality is ‘I’m going to have a Brandi Carlile song and a Tom Douglas song to round it out.’ I think she hears the Brandi Carlile song and “The House That Built Me” both as songs that she would sing. Never one time has she talked about rounding out an album: ‘I need some songs for radio, and this is my personal piece.’”

The Carlile cover, “Same Old You,” sits at the midpoint of Lambert’s new album. It’s a gutbucket country shuffle in the voice of a woman who’s made up her mind to leave a no-good man who shows no signs of changing his ways. It’s classic yet also quite clever, and Lambert draws out both qualities with the bluesy bite of her performance.

Consider “Same Old You” alongside the two songs that precede it – “Mama’s Broken Heart” and “Dear Diamond” – and you get a sense of how she’s applying her philosophy of survival of the fittest song. The three compositions come from vastly different sources – Carlile, a singer-songwriter with a growing cult following; Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally and Kacey Musgraves, a trio of Music Row pros; and Lambert solo – and yet they all hold together, they all ring true coming from her and not a one of them comes off as something you’ve heard a million times before.

“Mama’s Broken Heart” – a two-beat that lands on the commercial side of cowpunk – jibes with the commitment to emotional directness, impatience with maintaining appearances and potent, startling imagery that show up in some of Lambert’s best-known songs. And, reconfirming her gift for getting to the heart of the matter without resorting to cliché, “Dear Diamond” is a confession of infidelity that comes at the listener from an unexpected angle: this speaker is unburdening her heart not to a person, but to her wedding ring.

“When I got engaged I had a really strong relationship with my ring,” Lambert laughs gleefully, pondering what a sharp left turn the song took from real life. “When you first get engaged you just stare at your diamond all the time. And I thought, ‘I wonder if anyone’s written a song to their ring.’ And, of course, with the way that I write and the songs that I love, I always immediately go to the dark place first. And I had just gotten engaged, so Blake wasn’t too happy about the premise of the song.” She’s laughing again. “But I think a song like “Dear Diamond” needed to be written about deciding what to do and having an issue with your relationship.”

It’s one of two songs on the new album that Lambert wrote solo. “Safe” is the other. The fact that she’s still writing on her own, even as she turns her attention to a broader array of song sources, is of no small importance to her. “I just feel like it’s easier to co-write sometimes,” she shares, “especially if you have chemistry with somebody. It kind of takes all the pressure off of you. But, you know, I started writing songs by myself. I didn’t really have a co-writer, besides my dad. When I see a record and it has a song on it that someone wrote [alone], I just really believe in them as a writer. I feel like it’s a window into them, more than it is if you write a song with someone else.”

The argument could also be made that for an artist like Lambert – who knows her mind and, nowadays especially, her options – song selection can be something of a window to the soul, too. Her new album closes with “Oklahoma Sky,” the song by Allison Moorer. (Oklahoma is where Lambert moved a few years back to be near Shelton.) A hymn to love both earthly and transcendent that floats above a filigree of fingerpicking and ambient arpeggios, it’s one of the most ethereal and introspective entries in Lambert’s catalog. She and Moorer meant to write it together, but they could never get their schedules aligned.

Regardless, Lambert embraced the song, and the fact that it was written by another writer she’s long believed in. Says Moorer, “Anytime a fellow writer will put aside one of their own songs for one of yours, that means something. She’s not a person who doesn’t write.”

Precisely. She’s a person who’s instinctually evolving as a singer and a songwriter, and that’s a rare thing.