Miranda Lambert has won just about every country-music award in existence, but her barometer for success is rather simple: Do drag queens want to perform your songs onstage? Lambert loves a drag performance so much that when she first teased her new album, Crisco, this past summer, she did so with an event that she called a Crisco Disco Drag Brunch in Nashville. It felt like it would set the tone for this record.” Crisco gets its name from that same tone — a perfect blend of country and disco.
Think “Islands in the Stream”-era Dolly Parton, lush and layered strings, and rhinestone cowboys. At a point in her career when she’s arguably never been more lauded, Lambert just wanted to have a little fun. In the past few years, Lambert, 42, has taken what was already one of country music’s most celebrated careers into powerhouse, multi-hyphenate mode.
She’s a producer, most recently helping Ella Langley craft her breakthrough album, Dandelion. She’s a label owner, a fashion entrepreneur, and now, as co-writer of Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” partly responsible for the most successful song in Hot 100 history. She’s nominated for seven trophies at the Nov. 18 CMA Awards, in a year when she didn’t even put out an album of her own (Crisco won’t be eligible till next year’s awards).
Lambert realizes that disco influences might feel left field for some country fans, but she had such a good time dabbling in Seventies sounds on the groovy, glistening “A Song to Sing,” her collab with Chris Stapleton last year, that she and co-producer Jesse Frasure thought they’d try writing a few more in that vein. It’s a part of the genre that Lambert hadn’t really explored before — a little less cool than the Outlaws, a little less trendy than the Nineties. Listen to the crescendoing “To Everything,” or the Langley duet “Snakeskin Boots,” which opens the album with that familiar Lambert fire.
But there are also straight-up country ballads like the Patsy Cline-inspired “Two Things Can Be True,” which happens to be a good reminder that, on top of all of those other accolades, Lambert is one of the best vocalists in the genre and beyond. She’s also as saucy as ever, never one to tone down a woman’s sexuality, like on “Whiskey Business,” where she’s “gonna go all night and sleep all afternoon.” She probably won’t be riding any literal disco testicles onstage like Kacey Musgraves has, though. Musgraves recently featured Lambert on her song “Horses and Divorces,” a hilarious burying-the-hatchet moment between two stars who were rumored to have beef for years.
In a genre where female artists rarely receive more than 10 percent of country-radio airplay and are constantly forced to battle for one or two top spots, Lambert wants to focus on what she can do to elevate other women instead of competing with them. Related Content Lunar Landing: Dexter and the Moonrocks Touch Down in Country Music Fontaines D.C., Miranda Lambert, and All the Songs You Need to Know This Week Miranda Lambert and Ella Langley Throw on Their ‘Snakeskin Boots’ for New Collab Miranda Lambert Puts Her Boots on the Dance Floor With ‘Crisco’ “We need to do this together,” she says. We don’t have to be a sisterhood all the time, but I think it’s really important to lean on each other when we need to, and to support each other, because we know what it takes to do this.
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