Miranda Lambert Is In It For The Long Haul
Behind the microphone in a club a fraction of the size of her usual venues, Miranda Lambert was nervous. "We always get a little jittery when we play in Nashville," she admitted briskly, "'cause the energy is high and the expectations are high."
Her audience was an invite-only industry crowd of management reps, label staffers, media company executives, professional songwriters, journalists and others who'd have a hand or stake in the reception of her new music, and who she'd already loosened up with catered burritos and nachos, themed cocktails and a photo booth with a bucket full of cleaning-related props, in honor of her single "It All Comes Out in the Wash." With her full band crammed on the stage, Lambert performed that and several other songs from new album Wildcard.
Between tunes, she spoke like she was addressing comrades and confidants, thanking them for their continued goodwill and support. "I appreciate everybody in this room," she said, but she couldn't resist getting in a little crack as she introduced "Tequila Does," with its wryly tipsy, waltz-time feel: "If you don't like this and you don't think it's country, then you don't like country music."
Fifteen years into her recording career, Lambert, raised in Texas and still deeply attached to her Lone Star roots, is a Nashville insider and a rarefied embodiment of country ambition who hasn't entirely let go of her outsider's irreverence.
In 2003, when she was eliminated from the reality show music competition Nashville Star, winding up in third place, she didn't have to feign cheerfulness for the television cameras. The 19-year-old searched the front row of the audience for her parents' faces and mouthed a relieved, "Yes!"
As with the rest of the show's finalists, Lambert had been asked to record a song, though only the victor's would be released as a single. The prospect filled her with dread. "I'd be promoting something that I'm truly not in love with," she explains now. "I felt like, 'Well, that's gonna be fleeting, because that's not really who I am.' So I didn't want to win."
Mere months after her loss, one of the show's judges, Tracy Gershon, who worked in the artists and repertoire department at Sony Nashville, got her signed. When it came time to hash out details with the label brass, the still-teenaged Lambert walked into a conference room and delivered an ultimatum that's become the stuff of legend among those in her orbit. "The story goes that she more or less told the company that was how it was going to be — either this way or I'll just go home," marvels her longtime guitarist Scotty Wray, who'd already logged a couple of years with Lambert
