Miranda Lambert’s most recent record, Palomino, was easily one of my favorites from last year.
And in an interview with the LA Times in 2022 (around the album’s release), she detailed parts of her journey so far and how she’s been able to remain at the forefront of mainstream country music for so long by doing it her own way.
Of course, it hasn’t come without a few bumps in the road, and that includes her extremely public divorce from Blake Shelton back in 2015.
At the time, you couldn’t step foot into any sort of store without seeing one (or both) oof their faces plastered on the front page of a magazine with some sort of salacious gossip or spin to the divorce.
Blake has since remarried fellow The Voice coach Gwen Stefani and Miranda is now married to former NYPD officer Brendan McLoughlin, but Miranda recalls what “a shock to her system,” it was when she moved part-time to Hollywood with Blake and really experienced all of that tabloid scrutiny for the first time:
“I’m already very private and protective. And choosing the job I chose… I mean, I get onstage, I’m in front of people. But I didn’t choose random photos of moments when I wasn’t at work.”
With Nashville being basically the opposite of LA (in terms of paparazzi at least), she says they’ve run TMZ off more than once in Music City:
“TMZ has tried to come to Nashville like three times, and we keep running them out. We’re like, ‘Nope, not here.’”
She did learn a valuable lesson from her time there, though, that you’ve probably heard plenty of other country artists echo in the past (like Cody Johnson, for example):
“It taught me that Hollywood is not anything I want to be part of.”
Blake and Miranda were married in 2011, and Blake started his gig on The Voice that same year. Of course, there’s an endless supply of rumors in terms of what really went down between them, but ultimately, we did end up with an incredible record from Miranda in The Weight Of These Wings.
But she had to go through Hell to get there, saying the whole ordeal was:
“Horrible… like the death of something.”
She’s clearly since moved on, delivering a much lighter sentiment and feeling on Palomino (and even her 2019 Wildcard), but the trend of the “divorce album” is still alive and well.
Kacey Musgraves and Carly Pearce put out Star-Crossed and 29: Written In Stone in 2021, respectively, but Miranda says they get one good year to wallow and live in that space, and then it’s time to move on:
“I see all these women getting divorced, and I’m like, ‘You got one year, then no more wallowing. Let’s cry these tears and move on.’”
I can’t lie and say I don’t live for a good divorce record, but I think Miranda’s logic is spot on, and no on should live in that sad space forever… like she said before, it’s no way to be, even for the sake of “art”.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t still write those gut-wrenching sad country songs the genre is known for doing so well, and she included one of the best in her catalog on the Palomino tracklist, “Carousel”:
