#1 – Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – Miranda Lambert
The previous nine entries in this hindsight top ten list weren’t surprises. Every one of them was in at least the top five of the year of release, and while a couple of them leap-frogged other albums, they all pretty much landed in the same place.
Funny, then, that my number one entry didn’t even make it on a list the year of its release.
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.
For me, Miranda Lambert is the country Fiona Apple.
Now, I’ll need to explain that analogy further because clearly these two women are nothing alike. Lambert isn’t one to wallow the way Apple can — her breakup songs are more likely to end with a gunshot than a minor piano chord. And certainly their musical styles live on opposite sides of the spectrum.
No, my comparison is based on something much more superficial — the fact that each has completely captured my heart, mind and imagination over the course of just three albums.
Following a string of older albums, I’m now featuring the second most recent record on this list. And it’s the newest to me, as I discovered it only a little more than a year ago.
Miranda Lambert’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was released in 2007, two years after her debut album, Kerosene. It received universal critical acclaim of the sort that would have caught my attention but for the fact that it was about a country album. In 2007, that was a non-starter for me.
But as I’ve thoroughly documented on this blog, I started coming around to country music over the past couple of years and at the end of 2009, my conversion was complete thanks to Brad Paisley’s American Saturday Night and this album.
Top Ten Female Vocalists – #2 – Miranda Lambert
Miranda Lambert is the only woman on this list whose music I hadn’t even heard a year ago, and here she is all the way up at #2. I can thank Brad Paisley for the introduction.
After reading lavish praise of Paisley’s American Saturday Night during the 2009 best-of season, I decided to bite the bullet and give country music a real chance for the first time in my life. I bought a handful of country albums by artists such as Darius Rucker, Carrie Underwood, Lady Antebellum and Lambert.
Meet Me In Montauk 