One of her best.
“Gunpowder & Lead” 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 she’s told this story before, but one fan, who was being physically abused by her husband, was listening to “Gunpowder & Lead” and worked up the nerve to actually shoot him, and it’s really a wild story.
Miranda has talked about it here and there over the years, and during an appearance on the And the Writer Is… podcast yesterday, Miranda opened up about the song and all of the stories she’s heard about how it has inspired different women over the years:
“It’s such a huge staple for me and my catalog. Just the subject matter and how I got to that and who I got to write it with and the stories I’ve heard from women over the years.”
She brought up the woman who shot her husband, recalling the meet-and-greet where they met, and the woman wasn’t there to get a photo, because she had a story to share with Miranda, saying she “got off” and got away from her abusive husband:
“One lady walks up, and she’s like, ‘I don’t need a picture.’ She’s like, ‘I just want to tell you that I finally had enough and that song gave me the courage, and I did shoot him, and I got off.'”
Miranda says her jaw dropped realizing the woman was “dead serious,” and she was overcome with what that meant, saying they “cried together” during a very emotional moment:
“She was hardcore. Then we cried together because when somebody tells you something like that about something you wrote, that didn’t actually happen to you, it’s very intense.”
Miranda says she needed “a minute,” saying the moment helped her realize that “Gunpowder and Lead” isn’t just her playing a character” on stage, but it’s a very serious song about a very serious matter that is “touching people and affecting their lives” in a very real way:
“I realized in that moment that this isn’t just me playing a character on stage or me playing a character in the studio. This is a serious song about a serious matter, and it’s touching people and affecting their lives.”
To have that kind of tangible impact on someone in such a real way has to be an incredible feeling, and to be able to empower women through her music is a superpower Miranda has possessed since her career got started and has continued for decades now.
A few months ago during an 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.”
It certainly paid off, not just because of the commercial success and everything the song did for her career, but because it had a very real impact on people’s lives which I imagine is all you could ask for as a musician.
While it’s an anthem for women who have very sadly been in abusive relationships, it’s also a metaphoric anthem for women who need a little encouragement to take no s*** and believe in themselves and their worth, and that’s what makes it an all-time classic in my humble opinion.
It just never gets old…
“Gunpowder & Lead”
The full podcast is available below.
