It should come as no surprise that the greatest album by my favorite artist would end up as my #1 album of the decade.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the makeup and order of this list, but Miranda Lambert’s The Weight of These Wings was cemented in place before I even began.

In addition to releasing the 2010s’ best album, Lambert had a better overall decade than anybody else on this list. She released four solo albums and three with Pistol Annies. Almost every one of those albums could have been on my top 20 if I hadn’t gone with the ‘one release per artist’ rule. In fact, she’s the reason I came up with that rule in the first place.

Both 2011’s Four the Record and 2014’s Platinum placed in the top five when I did this exercise at the decade’s halfway point. They’ve only grown in my estimation since. And last month’s new release, Wildcard, is a brash, refreshing treasure, boasting a few tracks I already consider among Lambert’s best work.

But The Weight of These Wings is on another level altogether. It’s a 24-track break-up album, chock full of heartbreak and hope, at once showcasing country music at its best and exploding the expectations of the genre. It’s a journey that ebbs and flows, laughs and cries, rocks and sighs.

Lambert embraces the metaphor of her title, the idea that you can be set free (in this case, from an unhappy marriage) but still feel the burden of what you’ve lost. “Happiness ain’t prison but there’s freedom in a broken heart,” she sings in opening track ‘Runnin’ Just in Case.’

Most of the album’s songs are either about the love she lost or the process of picking up the pieces. The references to flight gradually (and literally) return to earth, segueing into one of Lambert’s favorite recurring motifs, a road trip into the unknown. As she sings on the album’s final track, “When I can’t fly, I start to fall, but I’ve got wheels… I’m rolling on.”

And roll on she does, recording one of my favorite albums ever and the best release of the 2010s.

Hope you enjoyed my musical journey through the last decade. I’d love to hear some of your favorites from the past ten years in the comments.