Miranda Lambert is one of country music’s best songwriters — and she’s got plenty of tales to tell on her upcoming album, Postcards From Texas.
Lambert, 40, opens up about the inspiration behind some of her new songs in an exclusive cover interview with Us Weekly ahead of the album’s Friday, September 13, release.
“After 20 years on Sony Records and then parting ways and regrouping, I had time to think, what do I really want my next chapter to be?” the Grammy winner explains. “I wanted to go back to the root and find my footing again. To finally make another record in Texas with my best friend, Jon Randall, and it just has this honky-tonk home sound to me. That’s the way I grew up. It’s the music that got me started. So it feels full circle.”
Randall, however, wasn’t the only collaborator on Postcards From Texas — Lambert’s husband, Brendan McLoughlin, snagged a songwriting credit on the single “Dammit Randy.”
According to Lambert, McLoughlin’s contribution came about after he claimed that “songwriting can’t be that hard,” so she asked the former police officer (whom she married in 2019) to put his money where his mouth is.
“We made him come to the studio and spend a whole day writing,” she tells Us. “He changed his tune after that. It was more of a fun experiment, but he got a great song out of it.”
For the track “Bitch on the Sauce,” Lambert worked with the Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston. “[He] came over to my bus on tour, and we made Bloody Marys and wrote ‘Bitch on the Sauce,’” she recalls, joking that “everyone at some point” can relate to the track’s pointed title.
Miranda Lambert and Brendan McLoughlin’s Relationship Timeline
While Lambert enlisted plenty of friends (and in the case of “Dammit Randy,” family) for Postcards, one song, “Run,” was written by her alone — and it’s actually a decade old. The CMA Award winner notes that revisiting her past in song was a freeing experience for her.
“When you solo write, you can’t hide anywhere. It’s like, here’s my diary,” she explains. “All of us have been in situations [where] you feel like, ‘I’m not being my true self. I’ve got to go figure that out,’ and knowing that it’s going to hurt everybody around, you have to do it because the reward is worth it.”
Postcards From Texas debuts Friday, September 13. For more with Lambert, watch the video above and pick up the new issue of Us Weekly, on stands now.
