Today’s track is from Pistol Annies’ debut album, and was penned and performed by Angaleena Presley, the least-famous Annie.
This tongue-in-cheek tune explores the life of a hunter’s wife, and throws in enough hunting jargon to weigh down an 11-point buck.
It got me thinking… what came first, country music’s music or its lyrics?
Miranda Lambert’s final solo track on the new Pistol Annies album is her most straight-forward response to date to her divorce from Blake Shelton.
This beautiful ballad explores the end of a relationship that existed entirely in a spotlight. She compares their marriage to a framed painting, a rodeo and a country song — all objects of public scrutiny. She recognizes that, in the general conversation, her love affair was a fleeting diversion: “We’re just another thing they’ll all forget about / They’ll be standing around laughin’ like nothing ever happened.”
Pistol Annies’ third album, Interstate Gospel, dropped last week and, no surprise, it’s another wonderful collection of traditional country music with a strong feminist bent.
Not to shortchange Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, who are both very talented, but this album is further proof that everything Miranda Lambert touches turns to gold.
Few musical announcements excite me more than word of new material from Miranda Lambert. Lambert is one of the few artists I follow who has yet to release an album that’s less than excellent.
2016’s double album The Weight of These Wings was her best work yet, and that’s saying something given that her previous two records showed up in my top five albums of the first half of the 2010s.
Miranda Lambert is one of the artists making multiple appearances on this list, and she shows up first as part of Pistol Annies, the country girl group she formed with friends and fellow songwriters Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe.
The best supergroups feel not like stunts but an organic coming together of similar musical sensibilities. The Traveling Wilburys are an old-school example, and Pistol Annies work just as well as that grizzled bunch.
