Miranda Lambert
Palomino
Vanner/RCA Records Nashville
Buy via Official Store | Listen Below
It’s an enviable—yet tricky—spot to be in; newly crowned Entertainer of the Year, and almost two decades into the most acclaimed career country music has ever seen. More than a dozen albums in, Miranda Lambert’s ability to wow has never faltered, and perhaps nobody will ever arrive to take up her mantle in the way she did with the demise of the Chicks, whose musical output her shadow now almost eclipses.
In the wider music press, including those publications that normally turn a cruelly blind eye to the country genre, Lambert’s music has just the reputation it deserves. Not a single project bearing her name has received anything but acclaim, due to her heartfelt delivery, her unapologetic eruptions of emotion, and a true-to-life lilt that pours pain like the whiskey she’s still finding new ways to rhyme.
While Lambert fairly frequently gets flack for not having quite the vocal range of her friend and country heavyweight Carrie Underwood, I’ll tell you the truth right now; there are plenty who can belt like Carrie, but few who can emote like Lambert. If Underwood—or really any of Lambert’s charting compatriots—came out with something this heartfelt, this pithy, this genuine, it would be hailed as the best album of their career. Yet it’s a compliment to the backdrop of Lambert’s fiercely honest and personal discography that this departure from the norm—a more-than-earnt odyssey through the stories of other people—is her least personal, and therefore simply unable to be her best.
“I kind of learned after Weight of These Wings that I don’t want to live everything I write about,” she confided to the Los Angeles Times last month. “That’s too much life—and too much heartbreak too.” Lots of these songs are transient in time and space, she hops from county to county, meeting characters and telling their stories. “Geraldene,” who we’ve already been introduced to on 2021’s The Marfa Tapes (a bare-bones revelation of a writer’s record,) gets a studio coat of paint here, as does “Waxahachie,” which maybe loses a dash of its haunting sorrow through heavy handed percussion, but still finds a more satisfyingly dusty feel than Jay Joyce gave to her previous album Wildcard.
In a genre frequently belied for being one-dimensional, Lambert’s characters appear in 3D, fully formed at even the simplest of couplets. When she mentions bygone stars of her genre, she doesn’t name drop, she storytells, as exemplified by lines like “Tina never quite had a Hollywood body / But she makes a damn good look-alike Dolly” on “Music City Queen,” a collaboration with The B-52’s. It’s like she’s never had more fun with a band, showcasing a swampy desert guitar and notions of fun only a honky tonk piano can provide.
Album closer “Carousel” is a song for the ages. Simple chords reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide give way to a story of a circus performer whose heart is broken by a fellow acrobat. The story hangs on a series of crushing metaphors and an impassioned chorus melody, a palpable yearning accentuated with the silence that follows each one. It’s so achingly tangible, that a full thirty seconds of ambient sound after the last note has rung provide reflection time in which you will sob. It’s the best song I’ve heard this year, and it will stick with me for many more.
Miranda Lambert has never cut a bad song, let alone a bad album. Her back catalogue is rock solid, and she’s more than paid her dues to make whatever kind of album she wants to make. Although I personally would love to see her return to long-term producer Frank Liddell just one more time, when I’m not in the mood for Palomino, there are a dozen era-defining albums of hers I can reach back to.
Notable Tracks: “Carousel” | “Geraldene” | “Music City Queen”
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