04.14.23: Notes on Miranda Lambert
I'm unconscionably tardy to the party on Platinum, I'm afraid.
Some days in this newsletter, in Notes on X, I’ll be writing about music and genres that I know pretty well. Some days, such as today, I’ll be writing somewhat ignorantly about music and genres that I’m only beginning to explore. So pardon my ignorance. But indulge my curiosity.
Also, I’ll try to do these on a schedule, perhaps Tuesdays and Fridays. I’ll try some other, longer formats in this newsletter, too, but this is a nice, bite-sized sort of post for me to get back into the habit of self-publishing.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the web video format of a random black guy recording his reaction to hearing, I don’t know, Achtung Baby or Black Sabbath for the first time in his life.
This is cringe clickbait, in most cases, but the motivating insight is very valid. Music really can knock you flat on your ass like nothing else. Your first time hearing a great song or a great album really can feel like a new, auspicious beginning of the rest of your life. It doesn’t even have to be the most technically impressive, musically revolutionary thing you’ve ever heard. Sometimes it’s the music you’d just never really given a chance, never thought much of or about, until suddenly, under the perfect conditions, you do. And there’s a little vicarious thrill in beholding this spark in others, especially if they’re first-encountering songs that once similarly electrified you.
I really do wish someone — ideally my friends Natalie and Jon, who both probably tried to deliver me to this appreciation sooner — had been around to record in real time my reaction to finally hearing Miranda Lambert’s fifth album, Platinum, released in June 2014, after all these years, on a recent springtime drive to the Barnes & Noble at Eton. Platinum is a killer album, up and down. Its hits are relentless. Its ignorance is blissful. Blasting “Smokin’ and Drinkin’” on I-480, marveling at the easy, incontrivertible swagger in this woman’s voice and the proud and boundless simplicity of her vision, I was truly a new man.
Miranda Lambert is wild. She’s goddamn Eazy-E on some songs. She’s ruthless but nonetheless heroic. Jon had a good term for her virtues in a concert write-up many years ago: “shotgun justice.” I know her “Time to Get a Gun,” on Revolution, is a cover, but still, I wasn’t ready to root so easily for a woozy white lady singing so coldly about shooting carjackers. She had me Googling gun ranges and everything.
I suppose I should’ve taken the winged and bedazzled six-shooters tattooed on her arm and emphasized in her album covers as a hint.
I wrung Platinum for quite a while and then eventually threw Revolution, Wildcard, and The Weight of These Wings into the rotation. Sometimes these albums shut me all the way up. Sometimes these albums had me spilling my guts to every contact named in my phone. Some friends sent playlists, some rather passionately composed. I’m only now getting to spend some time with Lambert’s latest album, Palomino, as I write this post.
I can’t say I dislike any of the albums I’ve heard so far, as I’m still sorting my characterizations of them in comparison to one another. I’m probably the coolest on Wings. That album strikes me as a stab at a more sort of seated, quote-unquote cultured concert experience; but to me Lambert sounds best when she’s getting slick and talking crazy, as on “Gunpowder & Lead,” “Only Prettier,” and “Geraldene,” and of course “Little Red Wagon.” I’m always coming back to Platinum.
Feel free to write in and contradict me, of course, those of you who are better versed — I’m still wrapping my head around a lot of these tracks.
I’m not totally unfamiliar with country music. In fact, I grew up listening to country radio, played in a tensely negotiated parity with rap radio, on the school bus. I tolerated it well enough then — as well as any non-fan could tolerate post-9/11 country radio in Virginia — but of course preferred to hear Nelly rapping over that damn vibraphone.
On that note, Jon and Kelefa Sanneh talked a bit about the similar postures of hip-hop and country songwriting in a recent Popcast about Morgan Wallen. Good convo.
Listening to Miranda Lambert and Zach Bryan in recent months is the deepest I’ve ever gotten “into” country music. Morgan Wallen, too, to some extent, now that I’ve mentioned him, I’ve got some strong opinions about “Sunrise.” But I suppose that’s another newsletter, for another discourse, on another day. For now let’s reserve our undivided attention for the only bitch in the band.
I was an indie rock kid who then got into everything else in college though not much country except for things adjacent to Dylan and Neil Young. Then this metal guy got me into drive by truckers, and then another indie rock kid got me into outlaw country. I only finally got into Miranda a few years ago, and she’s only one the only ones who can run the whole gamut from songs that should dominate country radio to Americana stuff that should dominate dudes who like Jason Isbell to outlaw country that Waylon and Willie would enjoy on the new album. There’s almost nothing she can’t do.
I also teach high school in an exurb of a smallish Rust Belt city and I get a playlist by surveying kids and the country kids love Zack Bryan, Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs and George Strait. The girls just...don’t like country, or they like the same stuff the boys do. They’ve definitely gotten me into Zack Bryan and George Strait, but I’m good not hearing the other two.