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.
Two years after her breakout sophomore album, Miranda Lambert returned to the airwaves with 2009’s Revolution, a sprawling, ambitious trek through a wide range of sounds and subject matter.
This was the album that earned Lambert mainstream attention, even before it was released. I read about her for the first time in an Entertainment Weekly article previewing Revolution and describing her brand of tough-girl-with-a-soft-side country music. The article piqued my interest but not enough to get me to buy the album.
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.
It’s wonderful to witness the emergence of your children’s sense of humor. One of the great things about parenthood is having these little people around to make you laugh — from the delighted giggles inspired by a newborn’s first smiles to the proud guffaw after she makes up her first knock-knock joke that’s actually objectively funny.
Both of my daughters are funny in ways both silly and smart. My youngest, Fiona, can own a room with her oddball antics but also seems to grasp more nuanced humor, or at least that’s how it seems to me (and I’m not biased, not at all…). And my oldest, Sophia, well, she has developed into quite the comedienne. She’s sarcastic as hell, sometimes to a fault. And she can make me laugh better than anyone.
I first heard of Miranda Lambert when her 2009 album Revolution was released last summer. The write-ups in Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly raved about the album, calling it the best country record of the year and one of the best overall, and remarked that Lambert had knocked one out of the park in her first outing since the acclaimed Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Such was my bias against country music at the time that I didn’t even think about picking up the album. Compare that to, say, the praise heaped on Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, which prompted me to buy that album despite my general disinterest in rap music. (I didn’t like Wayne’s album much at all, incidentally, so maybe that was a lesson learned).
Meet Me In Montauk 