The 2014 album release schedule is still a bit murky (as it always is at this time of year) but so far there aren’t a ton of upcoming records I’m excited about.
Interestingly, the releases I’m most looking forward to are all by female artists. Shakira’s new album is out this week, Lily Allen’s long-awaited third record is due soon, Taylor Swift will aim for another smash hit sometime this year and Aimee Mann is releasing a duet with indie performer Ted Leo in April.
#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 ‘Airstream Song,’ from her 2009 album Revolution, is an ode to the lives we might have lived.
I’m sure Lambert prefers her life as country music royalty to a life moving town to town in an Airstream, breaking hearts along the way. But I don’t doubt for a second that she sometimes wishes she could know what that other life is like.
The final week of the genome project kicks off without any of the complexity of last Friday’s focus, Elvis Costello.
Miranda Lambert doesn’t blend genres and influences — she’s a country girl, through and through. ‘Country Plus,’ to use my designation, and she earns the ‘plus’ through the songwriting and performing chops that have lifted her to the top of the charts and onto countless critics’ best-of lists.
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.
