She went through hell, but she got a hell of an album out of it, for whatever that’s worth…
Miranda Lambert and her ex-husband Blake Shelton went through a very public divorce in 2015, and it was the hot topic in the tabloids for months on end. It didn’t exactly end on great terms, but clearly both are happily remarried now and have moved on from that time in their lives.
She has opened up about a little bit here and there over the years, and during an appearance on the And the Writer Is… podcast yesterday, Miranda opened up about that time and how hard it was to not only go through a divorce, but to do it so publicly.
Of course, her masterpiece sixth studio album The Weight Of These Wings was instantly labeled a “divorce album” when it was announced, because it immediately followed her divorce, and it’s one of the most brilliant country records of the last 15 years, and ten 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.
She poured her heart and soul into it, and it all came from a very real place.
While they were married, the couple mostly lived in Blake’s hometown of Tishomingo, Oklahoma, and Miranda talked more about her divorce than I’ve ever heard in an interview, saying it was “not a fun time” and she turned to songwriting to help her get through it, saying she wrote over 75 songs during that time of “misery,” which of course became The Weight of These Wings:
“I got divorced and that sucks for anyone, especially in the public eye, especially on tour, especially in the middle of a very public career — two of us — you know what I mean? It just was a really not fun time.
And I, in the meantime, had moved back to Nashville full-time, and so I dove headfirst into songwriting. I had missed it.”
Prior to Wings, Miranda had released Platinum, a much different kind of album, and Miranda says she was able to use her “misery” to write, admitting that she was “staying out too late at honky tonks” and those experiences just poured out of her into the music:
“And when I moved back in 2015, I gathered up all of my friends and relationships from, you know, all of the previous years and just used it, used the misery.
I used the staying out too late at honky-tonks. I used what I was living and my friends went on that journey with me — friends being songwriters — and I think I wrote 75 songs in like, a year. I mean, in like, the first four months I moved back.”
While it was one of the most difficult chapters of her life, Miranda called it “magical” because of what it did for her songwriting in terms of using that “raw emotion,” adding that she also grew as a “vocalist,” calling it all “wroth it” because all of that emotion was “worth laying out there”:
“And it was kind of magical because I really started growing my songwriting then. It wasn’t writing towards a specific record or a sound or a feisty or whatever. It was, like, raw emotion.
And I think I really grew as a vocalist and a songwriter because I spent so much of my downtime with a guitar in my hand for the first time, you know?… And it was worth it. It was worth laying it out there.”
It was a career-defining album, one that cemented her as one of the genres modern day greats, and it will forever be one of my all-time favorites.
You can watch the full interview below.
