It just doesn’t get better than “Gunpowder & Lead.”
It was Miranda Lambert’s first Top 10 hit at country radio, and it remains a fan-favorite song to this day… I mean, I truly don’t think there’s a better song to absolutely scream your heart out than that one. It helped shape her reputation as a bad*** who doesn’t take anybody’s crap, and it will forever be one of my favorites in her vast and incredible catalog.
She co-wrote it with Heather Little, and it was released in 2008 as the third single from her album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. In addition to peaking at #7 on country radio, it became minor crossover hit, peaking at #52 on the US Billboard Hot 100 all-genre chart. It has since been certified 3× Platinum by the RIAA.
Miranda’s parents were private investigators in small town Texas when she was growing up, and they would often take in battered women and children and give them a safe place to stay, so Miranda was exposed to a lot and many of those stories together over the years inspired the song.
And during a recent interview for Elle with Reba and Ella Langley, Miranda says a lot of the small risks she took early in her career didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but the big ones “always did.”
She viewed it as very risky to put out a song that was about “shooting an abusive husband” on country radio, because there were not many songs like that getting played on mainstream country radio at the time, but Miranda felt like it was something that “needed to be heard” and “needed to be said,” and she couldn’t have been more right in my humble opinion:
“When I’m sitting here looking at all three of us, I feel like, there’s small risks that don’t matter in the big scheme of things that didn’t pay off, I feel like, but the big ones always did. One of my first songs out was ‘Gunpowder & Lead.’ Like, that wasn’t that popular to be singing about shooting an abusive husband on the radio.
You know what I mean? But I was like, I don’t care, because it’s something I lived through, like, vicariously through my parents helping women and their kids. And I wrote a song about it, and I wanted it to be heard. It needed to be said.”
She then turned to Ella to acknowledge that they needed to be friends for that very reason…
“I think, just sticking to my guns is why, maybe someone like you, we needed to be friends because you see that part of yourself.”
Considering how popular and successful that song became, it’s hard to even imagine that there was a time it could be considered a big risk, but certainly paid off and then some and she deserves a TON of credit for taking that risk despite the fact that I’m sure there were a ton of people who thought it was a very bad idea:
Turn it up… it will simply never get old:
“Gunpowder & Lead”
