I suppose it’s fitting that my first Random Weekend selection after a week dedicated to my favorite country artist would be from the only true country album I owned before becoming a fan.
Tim McGraw’s And the Dancehall Doctors is a great country record for people who don’t like country music. It has a nice pop sheen, impressive instrumentation, solid songcraft, even a cover of Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer.’
By the time Miranda Lambert released her fourth solo album (and fifth straight album to debut at #1 on the country charts — a record), she was country music royalty.
She and Blake Shelton had overtaken Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as country’s preeminent power couple, she’d won more than 20 awards from the Grammys, CMT’s, CMA’s, ACM’s and all the rest, and she’d been widely accepted as the next Loretta Lynn. In fact, when Lynn presented her with one of those awards, it was viewed in the industry as a symbolic passing of the torch.
2011 was a big year for Miranda Lambert.
She married longtime boyfriend Blake Shelton (who was just about to reach a whole new level of stardom thanks to The Voice), notched her second #1 and eighth top 20 song with ‘Heart Like Mine’ (the fifth single from Revolution) and released the two best country albums of the year within a few months of each other.
Not bad for a small-town Texas girl.
Two years after her breakout sophomore album, Miranda Lambert returned to the airwaves with 2009’s Revolution, a sprawling, ambitious trek through a wide range of sounds and subject matter.
This was the album that earned Lambert mainstream attention, even before it was released. I read about her for the first time in an Entertainment Weekly article previewing Revolution and describing her brand of tough-girl-with-a-soft-side country music. The article piqued my interest but not enough to get me to buy the album.
Miranda Lambert’s second album, 2007’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, made her a star with critics. She was hailed as the brightest new country music voice in a generation — the next Loretta Lynn.
She was also a hit with country fans, her album reaching #1 on those charts for the second time, though she didn’t enjoy much crossover success.
Meet Me In Montauk 