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Monday, 1 March, 2010 11:43 AM
Miranda Lambert Packs More Than
Heat on 'Revolution'
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Photo
by Randee St. Nicholas
Miranda
Lambert |
| By
Bob Doerschuk |
| ©
2010 CMA Close Up News Service |
Revolution was in the
air at the Ryman Auditorium on the night of Sept. 24. The capacity
crowd, filled with Nashville music glitterati, roared as the house
lights darkened. Cameras flashed, as if pictures of the solitary
microphone stand in front of the stage curtain could capture the
moment. Music blared over the P.A. — the lazy stroll of The
Beatles’ “Revolution,” the growling promise of
Steve Earle’s “The Revolution Starts Now.”
And then the curtain
whipped open and in a blaze of lights Miranda Lambert and her band
blasted into “White Liar,” the second single and first
of 15 tracks on her new Columbia Records album, Revolution.
They played each one in sequence, the joyful snarl of her Natalie
Hemby co-write “Only Prettier” slipping easily into
the slow-motion intensity of “Dead Flowers” and so on.
On the faster tunes, during instrumental breaks,
Lambert stepped back to join the musicians, pounding her guitar,
whipping her head back and forth, immersed in the beat. On the ballads
she stood still, eyes closed, caressing each word in the lyric —
or, during her reading of Tom Douglas’ and Allen Shamblin’s
“The House That Built Me,” she sat on a stool, just
a few feet before her parents in the front row; as she sang the
line “Daddy gave life to Mama’s dream,” her father
could be seen wiping away a tear.
So it went all the way
to the closer, “Virginia Bluebell,” a wistful ballad
written by Lambert, Hemby and Jennifer Kennard, delicate in texture
and hopeful in tone. As she finished, the stage lights dimmed, the
audience seemed to hold its breath — and suddenly Lambert
stood again in the light, proclaiming with disarming directness,
“That’s it! That’s Revolution, y’all!”
“She is so accessible,”
said Joe Galante, Chairman, Sony Music Nashville, recalling that
moment and the ovation that followed. “That was a very emotional
night for all of us. It was a very bold step for her to go, ‘I’m
going to play my entire new album, which I delivered a couple of
weeks ago, in front of the most important audience of my career,
and cross my fingers.’ But as she went through it and then
jumped into the hits she’s had, you got a complete picture
of Miranda Lambert. You think of her as this angry chick, ready
to blow somebody’s head off. And then you see her and what
she puts into the music, how careful and thoughtful she is about
it, the reverence she has for everything that’s involved —
and she’s a sweetheart!”
Certainly it was clear
to all at the Ryman that night that Lambert has come a long way
since she nearly made it to the top of “Nashville Star”
in its first season. Her first album, Kerosene, would break the
Platinum barrier; the follow-up, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, debuted
on the charts at No. 1. On tours with Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley,
Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, George Strait and Keith Urban, she proved
that she could rock it in stadiums as hard as she had done on the
Texas club circuit in her teens.
Revolution,
though, is a revelation, revealing an insight into subtler emotions
and an elevating technique as a vocal stylist that match her celebrated
ways of conveying the romance of danger — or, perhaps, the
dangers of romance.
“I think Revolution
is more diverse than the other two,” Lambert mused. “It’s
a lot the same too; we use the same musicians and the same producers,
so there’s still that element of the Miranda Lambert sound
that I’ve had throughout the other records. But it has a lot
more elements about different phases of life because that’s
what I’m living. This is definitely my favorite album that
I’ve done.”
“The first album
was fun,” recalled Frank Liddell, who co-produced all three
of Lambert’s albums with Mike Wrucke. “There was an
element of feeling each other out in a good, positive way. With
the second one everyone was excited but tentative, if that makes
sense, like, ‘Wow, can we do it again?’ This one was
like, ‘Hey, we’ve done it twice. Let’s go and
have that much fun again.’”
With the same two producers
and core lineup of musicians including guitarists Richard Bennett,
Jay Joyce and Randy Scruggs, bassist Glenn Worf, drummer Chad Cromwell
and percussionist Eric Darken, each of Lambert’s albums represents
a collective as well as individual growth. They also reflect the
spontaneity that has become essential to their process. “I
never listen to demos on her stuff,” said Wrucke. “I
don’t want to hear someone else’s vision for a song
in a quick demo and then try to get that out of my head. I only
want to hear her play and sing the song acoustically and then we
make it up from there.”
“I love working
with these guys because they build tracks around my lyrics instead
of making a track and I sing over it,” Lambert explained.
“I don’t have anything in mind when I go into the studio.
I play my song and say, ‘Y’all go and do what you think
it should sound like.’ It’s like ‘White Liar,’
which I wrote with my friend Natalie (Hemby). I just sat down and
played the song for the musicians, they went in and noodled for
about an hour and it started coming together. And the original of
the John Prine song, ‘That’s the Way That the World
Goes ’Round,’ is obviously very different from our version.
It was definitely a surprise to all of us, the shape that song took
on. We had so much fun letting it go, with everybody getting out
of control. It was a blast because there were really no rules, and
that gives everybody such creative feeling.”
The sonic range of Revolution
goes beyond the limits of her previous work, pushing even into territories
that Wrucke characterizes as “Country punk.” Galante
concurred, noting that the album “has edge and power, with
the soulfulness of what comes out of the Country side. If Merle
Haggard and Waylon Jennings were able to conceive a child, it would
have been Miranda Lambert; that’s what this sound is to me.”
Yet Lambert, who wrote
or co-wrote 11 of these songs, considers this to be her most Country-oriented
album to date. “I love steel guitar and it has tons of steel,”
she pointed out. “And it’s more lyrically Country.”
She cites two songs as
examples: “Maintain the Pain,” one of the three tracks
she wrote on her own, and “Airstream Song,” among four
collaborations with Hemby featured on the album. “‘Maintain
the Pain’ is definitely a rocker but the lyrics could be sung
in a totally different way because it’s a Country song,”
she said. “And ‘Airstream Song’ is 100 percent
Country. Maybe I say that because I’m a Country girl and I
wrote the song from a Country girl’s perspective. It’s
up to everybody else to interpret what they think about the lyrics.
But almost every song on here, at least the ones I wrote, has a
Country element, not only because of my influences and roots but
because of the way I sing them.”
The reference in “Maintain
the Pain” to shooting her radio and her swaggering cover of
Fred Eaglesmith’s “Time to Get a Gun” fit easily
withthe image established by “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,”
“Gunpowder & Lead” and “Kerosene,” but
Revolution also highlights a poetic quality that seems likely to
add dimension to her writing and vocal interpretation from this
point. Listening to the imagery unfold throughout “Dead Flowers,”
for instance, is like studying a still life and finding new layers
of meaning with each passing minute.
“That came from
a vase of flowers I had gotten for Valentine’s Day,”
she said of this song, which she wrote solo. “I had to throw
them out because I was leaving town and I thought, ‘Wow, what
a waste.’ Also, I leave my Christmas lights up all year, so
they were kind of hanging down and some of them were broken. That
started the entire song. I wanted to write it so that when people
listened they could see what I was seeing.”
It also helped her reach
deeper into her resources as an interpreter of lyrics. “I
definitely had to put myself in character for songs like ‘Dead
Flowers’ because I’m happy right now. I’m in a
great place in life. But I like songs that are about reality, so
I have to remember the pain and remember being angry when I write
from that perspective. When I wrote ‘Dead Flowers,’
I was hanging out at the farm with the animals. Blake (Shelton)
was over. It was actually a really great day — but I wrote
this sad song. So I guess I’m reinventing myself a little
bit lyrically and breaking out artistically. It’s all about
reinventing yourself while staying true to your originality.”
That, according to Galante,
is the key to what he sees as Lambert’s arrival as an artist
with true staying power. “She has strength and power but she
also has vulnerability and sensitivity. On this record, we’ve
gotten the balance between the two. That’s what draws people
to her — and that’s why it’s important for the
format to have her.”
On the Web:
www.MirandaLambert.com
Photo
by Randee St. Nicholas
Miranda
Lambert
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