I got a sense of the risks Miranda Lambert is taking on her new album, Four the Record, when I played the second track for my daughters.
The song, ‘Fine Tune,’ is a bluesy come-on with thick drums, a wailing lead guitar and a distortion effect on Lambert’s vocals — it’s more White Stripes than ‘White Liar.’ My girls, who are almost as big Miranda Lambert fans as I am, scrunched up their faces and said “Turn this off!” and “It hurts my ears!”
A couple of weeks back I did a theme week on metaphors and my intent was to follow it up with a series on similes. But I wasn’t coming up with many great examples and the whole process started to feel like a project for a freshman English class, so I abandoned it.
One song I had planned to feature in my ‘simile week’ was Miranda Lambert’s ‘Dead Flowers.’ This was an early single off of her excellent third album Revolution and one of her most effective.
The album I’m most looking forward to this year is Miranda Lambert’s Four the Record, due out on November 1. I can’t name many up-and-coming artists whose music I enjoy as much as hers.
But Lambert has made the wait a lot easier by teaming up with a couple of songwriting buddies, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, to form Pistol Annies, a girl group in the old-school tradition. Their debut album, Hell on Heels, was released last month as a digital download and still managed to top the country charts and land at #5 on the overall Billboard chart.
As a result, Lambert is the first country artist in history to reach #1 both as a solo artist and as part of a group.
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.
In the final episode of The Voice, when all the voting was done and the network just needed to burn 55 minutes before revealing the winner, each of the finalists got to perform with an established artist.
Javier Colon sang ‘Landslide’ with the legendary Stevie Nicks, whose voice is showing signs of age but who still commands the stage with her very awesomeness. Vicci Martinez performed with the guy from Train, one of her favorite groups. Beverly McClellan sang with some guy I’d never heard of before and further established that, no matter how strong her voice is, she can’t command an audience’s attention for more than 20 seconds.
