Nothin’ like a good old fashioned country heartbreaker.
Today, Miranda Lambert released “Driving Back There In My Mind” as part of Apple Music’s new Lost & Found series, which is a track written by The Love Junkies trio in Lori McKenna, Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose.
The new series focuses on showcasing unreleased country tracks from some of Music City’s best songwriters, and in a forthcoming interview for Today’s Country Radio with Kelleigh Bannen, Miranda says there are “so many gems” laying around Nashville just waiting to be recorded.
She added that some of her biggest hits are actually outside writes:
“There’s so many gems laying around Nashville that have never made their way into their light yet, and I love that this project is shedding light on those songs.
And with my career if I hadn’t picked outside songs, I wouldn’t have some of the biggest hits of my career. So I think it’s so important for artists that are writers to really remember you don’t have to write everything that you cut.
A lot of your friends in this town are pouring their hearts out every single day to make the best songs available to us, and they are right there. We just got to go find them.”
Miranda also explained that when it came time to pick a song for this project, Apple initially sent her something different, but she texted The Love Junkies on her own to make sure she found one that sounded very “her.”
When she heard “Driving Back There In My Mind,” Miranda immediately fell in love with the “old-school country” sound and knew it was a perfect fit:
“The process of picking one was a lot harder because it’s [The Love Junkies], and there’s so many gems. I just group-texted them. I was like, ‘What do y’all think?’
I just wanted to make sure I was digging deep in the well of what they had because they have so many that feel so right for me. And the one that I was thinking about, I didn’t feel like it was 100% yet.
So Hillary had dug ‘Driving Back There In My Mind’ out of some vault in her phone, and it just felt really me, and it felt really good. It’s old-school country to me.”
And in another forthcoming conversation from Lost & Found Radio with Lori McKenna, the girls explained that it had previously been a work tape on someones iPhone from a write at one of their houses.
They all agreed that the demo was “magical,” and even mentioned that Tim McGraw had it on hold at point to potentially cut.
Liz Rose says in the end, though, it ended up right were it needed to be with Miranda:
“It landed where it was supposed to be”
It’s certainly a stunner of a track, which features some beautiful steel guitar along with Miranda’s twangy vocals, and harkens back to the vintage sound of 70’s and 80’s country, which I personally love.
She paints a sad picture of missing someone and reminiscing on all the good times they had together, while trying to accept the fact that it’s over for good. At the very least, she’s “always driving back there in my mind,” for whatever thats worth.
I wish it was available across all streaming platforms, because it’s actually one of my favorite songs Miranda has put out in a while, so hopefully she’ll record it for another record or something one day.
And of course, if you have Apple Music, you can listen to the whole song there now, but if you don’t, you can listen to a clip of it here:
The original work tape demo:
In terms of other music, Miranda most recently released a duet with her fellow Texan Leon Bridges called “If You Were Mine”:
