It was a career-defining album.
Miranda Lambert released her incredible 2016 “divorce album” The Weight of These Wings on this date nearly ten years ago… way before the double album trend really started in country music.
Of course, her sixth studio album was instantly labeled a “divorce album” when it was announced, because it immediately followed her extremely public divorce from Blake Shelton in 2015. It’s one of the most brilliant country records of the last 15 years, and seven years later, it remains timeless with tales about love, loss and everything in between.
Few “divorce albums” (or double albums, for that matter) end up being what we all hope they will be, because most artists end up holding back and leaving important things out for fear of revealing too much. Or, they included songs that would typically be left on the cutting room floor just for the sake of calling the project a double album, sacrificing the overall quality.
Miranda certainly did not have that problem here, and that alone allowed this record to reach its full, unbridled potential. The Weight of These Wings debuted at #1 on the U.S. Billboard Country Albums chart, and also won Album of the Year at the 2017 ACM Awards, which was Lambert’s fifth consecutive album to win the award, a record for any artist.
From songs like “Vice” and “Tin Man,” to more upbeat tunes like “Pink Sunglasses” and “We Should Be Friends,” there are no skips… it’s pure and simple country perfection and an album that will go down as a career-defining moment for one of country music’s modern superstars.
And during an interview on The Kelleigh Bannen Show following the recent release of her new album Crisco, Miranda explained that there have been songs she waited to release because she just wasn’t ready for the world to hear it. Albums like The Weight of These Wings were her “bleeding on paper,” she says:
“I’ve had songs, like on the last record, I had a song that I let sit for ten years. Wasn’t ready, ‘Run.’ Wasn’t ready. Then there’s also this, ‘The Weight of These Wings’ was just bleeding on paper the whole entire double album, good bad ugly, I’m not hiding anything.
I feel like I moved on after that, it helped me get over it, you know what I mean? Did it, lived that, felt that, wrote about it, put it on tape, next. Move on, can’t live in that.”
She also told a funny story that her husband, Brendan, had never heard The Weight of These Wings until recently, and her friend and backup singer, Gwen, played it for him. Miranda laughed as she said there were some songs he “hated,” and he gave his very honest feedback, which she loved it:
“So my husband actually never heard ‘The Weight of These Wings.’ My friend, my back up singer Gwen, played him a few songs. We were all drinking wine on the porch the other day, and he was like, ‘I’ve never heard this.’
I was like, ‘Bro, do you have iTunes on your phone?’ Like, what are we doing? You want me to go get you an LP? What is happening? Because he knows most of it… he knew a couple songs, a couple of them he hated, which he was very vocal about, which I love. But it was awesome.”
He must have been living under a rock… but it’s actually really funny that he didn’t like some of those songs, and I guess it makes sense. The album was about her divorce from another man.
Miranda says she’s been in the process of getting all of her catalog more organized, and during that process as she’s gone back and listened to old songs, she can hear the transition in her voice both physically, and from a writing standpoint, which really happened with The Weight of These Wings.
She attributes it to going through all of that “extreme pain”:
“Sometimes when I’m talking about, we’ve been really trying to get my catalog in order just because I wasn’t organized all these years. The admin, going and asking every publisher in town, do you have anything with her name on it? Just trying to organize and it’s like, 300 or something. They’ll send me a title and I’m like, I didn’t write this, they’re like, yes you did.
So when we were trying to get all that together, I revisited some of my early stuff, and it’s so weird to hear your baby self on tape. and it also shows me, I realized when I go back and listen to all that stuff, I realized when my voice switched, and it was during extreme pain, and it did change my voice, not only physically, but my writing voice and how I wanted to say things.
Because I was actually on my first real, hard struggle. Adult struggle bus. And I hear that in the transition from ‘Kerosene’ to ‘The Weight of These Wings,’ I actually physically can hear it.”
She also admitted that season of going through a divorce taught her a lot, mostly to have “more empathy” for people going through struggle. She explained that, before she was on that side of it, she never understood it, and it was obviously a huge learning experience on all fronts:
“I think it was vulnerability more than ever. Which, I already had been. In life, it was like, more empathy. I didn’t give people enough time, and grace and space to sit in their sadness until I was living in some of my own.
People that had been through it were letting me have that space and that grace. So I think it taught me how to be more empathetic and understand when people are struggling. Like, it’s not just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and move on. You gotta live in that for a minute, it opened my eyes to that feeling.
And for my career, I really grew as a songwriter during that season. I really pushed myself, I wrote so many songs, and they weren’t all about that, I just felt like I was learning how to use it properly in the moment.”
It’s been almost ten years to the day since she put the album out in 2016, and you can hear the pain and emotion in every single song… it’s just brilliant.
And while it’s great that she’s since moved on, obviously she shouldn’t sit in that pain forever, she took a horrible season of life and turned it not only into a musical masterpiece, but it sounds like learned a lot about herself, too.
Brendan was really missing out…
“Runnin’ Just In Case”
“Vice”
“To Learn Her”
