During a recent episode of And The Writer Is…With Ross Golan, Miranda Lambert opened up about her two decades in music, how her songwriting has evolved and how she coped with heartache through a prolific period of songwriting.
Following the success of her 2014 album Platinum, which topped Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart for six weeks, Lambert’s next album, 2016’s The Weight of These Wings, was a double-disc project that delved into processing and moving on from heartbreak in the wake of her very public divorce from fellow country star Blake Shelton. Lambert and Shelton wed in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2015.
“2015, I got divorced and that sucks for anyone, especially in the public eye, especially on tour, especially in the middle of a very public career—two of us, you know what I mean? It just was a really not fun time,” Lambert recalled. She dealt with the personal hardships by turning to music as a healing balm and way of processing. Along the way, she says she wrote 75 songs in just months while making The Weight of These Wings.
Lambert said, “I dove head-first into songwriting…I would come to town and write specifically for Platinum and then I was out. And when I moved back [to Nashville] in 2015, I gathered up all of my friends and relationships from, you know, all of the previous years, and just used it, like used the misery [to write The Weight Of These Wings]. I used the staying out too late at honky-tonks. I used what I was living and my friends went on that journey with me — friends being songwriters. I think I wrote 75 songs in like a year, I mean in like the first four months I moved back, and it was kinda magical because I really started growing my songwriting then.
“It wasn’t writing towards a specific record or a sound, or feisty or whatever, it was raw emotion,” she continued. “I think I grew as a vocalist and a songwriter because I spent so much of my downtime with a guitar in my hand for the first time.”
Discussing songs such as “Tin Man” and “Vice” that came from that album and seeing the enduring impact they have had, Lambert said, “It was worth it. It was worth laying it out there.”
Since then, Lambert has gone on to notch even more of her own hits including the Country Airplay topper “Bluebird” and the Chris Stapleton collab “A Song to Sing,” while also writing numerous hits for other artists — most notably, as a co-writer on Ella Langley’s current Billboard Hot 100-dominating hit “Choosin’ Texas,” which is now the longest-charting No. 1 in Hot 100 history. Lambert also found love again and wed former New York Police Department officer Brendan McLoughlin in 2019.
She recently released her new album, Crisco, and celebrated by performing at the new Nashville venue The Truth the week the album was released.
Watch Lambert’s appearance on And The Songwriter Is…With Ross Golan below.
