This is the eighth song I’ve posted from Miranda Lambert’s 2016 double album The Weight of These Wings, and the fourth on a Random Weekend.
A couple of years back, I named this album the best of the 2010s, an easy call. There isn’t a weak track among its 24 songs, even as it jumps around between atmospheric ballads, traditional Americana, and country pop.
Today’s random SOTD is from The Weight of These Wings, Miranda Lambert’s splendid 2016 double album (which I recently named my favorite of the previous decade).
‘Keeper of the Flame’ is one of the album’s upbeat tracks, and one of the few that isn’t about going through or recovering from a breakup.
This song is about Lambert’s place in a long line of women in both country music and music industry generally.
This song appears toward the end of Disc One of Miranda Lambert’s 2016 The Weight of These Wings. It’s one of only two tracks on the double album not written by Lambert.
‘Covered Wagon’ is a cover of one of singer-songwriter Danny O’Keefe’s earliest songs. O’Keefe is a Seattle-based folk-rock performer whose work has been covered by a host of artists over the past 50 years. The one readers of this blog might know best is ‘The Road,’ performed by Jackson Browne on his Running on Empty album.
It should come as no surprise that the greatest album by my favorite artist would end up as my #1 album of the decade.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the makeup and order of this list, but Miranda Lambert’s The Weight of These Wings was cemented in place before I even began.
Five years ago I did a countdown of my favorite albums of the 2010s to that point, halfway through the decade. Two of my top five entries were by Miranda Lambert — 2011’s Four the Record and 2014’s Platinum.
Five years later, we’re 11 1/2 months away from the end of the decade (wow!) and I have to start thinking about updating that list and arriving at the definitive version. Both of those albums will still be in play, no question.
Meet Me In Montauk 