Miranda Lambert: Born to Run
On an entertaining new album, the iconic country singer espouses the pleasures of home... yet still can't shake the urge to run away.
Miranda Lambert - Postcards from Texas
“Been to New York, been to Rome/ Lately anywhere but home,” sings Miranda Lambert on one of her new songs, the punning “Looking Back at Luckenbach.” Lambert has long cast herself as an inveterate runner, eager to travel the world in search of love but unwilling to settle down once she finds it, instead discovering meaning and salvation in constant forward motion. “Nobody ever taught me how to stay,” she once memorably summarized.
It comes as no small surprise, then, that her latest album is ostensibly about the pleasures of home. Lambert is a proud daughter of the Lone Star State, and her tenth studio album is titled Postcards from Texas. Before its release Lambert promised her fans an album that was “honky tonk as hell,” and Postcards more or less delivers: Drenched in pedal steel, full of hardscrabble songs about loving and losing, this is the closest Lambert’s ever gotten to making a straight-up red dirt country album. Lambert started to withdraw from the country radio rat race as far back as 2016’s The Weight of These Wings, and here she makes not a single concession to the Nashville mainstream.
The songs draw from classic country tropes, presenting relational disrepair through both humor and earnest emotion. Lambert is the very best at this sort of thing, and it's remarkable that, two decades into her career, her material can be as trenchant as ever. “Dammit Randy,” an early-album highlight, is a brilliantly realized character study, withering in its dismissal of a man who didn’t realize what he had until it was too late. (“You gave up til the very last minute/ Now that you’re gone I’ve got your attention,” she chides; not mad, just disappointed.) It immediately ranks among her essential songs.
Like her previous album, 2022’s free-spirited Palomino, Postcards from Texas takes the shape of a travelogue— but rather than drifting from town to town, Lambert instead drifts back through memory. On “Looking Back on Luckenbach,” she can’t separate a favorite small town watering hole from the man she loved and lost there. Likewise, she sings about driving through “Santa Fe” every September, “hangin’ on to a memory that won’t ever fade.” The longing is palpable.
Lambert’s lusty drawl remains country music’s most expressive instrument, and at 40 she is able to invest a lifetime of regret— but also weathered endurance— into even the most doleful material. You can probably guess before you hear it why Lambert would proclaim “I Hate Love Songs,” yet there’s plenty of ache in hearing her deliver the song’s tale of good love gone bad.
Other songs capture the grand Texas tradition of tall tales and shaggy dog stories. Lambert sounds every bit the crusty old yarn-spinner on album opener “Armadillo,” a classic bullshitter’s anthem about a hitchhiking, pistol-packing varmint. One of the three songs on the album to bear an explicit language warning, it finds Lambert double-dog-daring you to challenge her veracity: “Honey, you can’t make this shit up.” To paraphrase a priceless Willie Nelson joke, you can always tell a Texan, but you can’t tell her much.
Even more raucous is “Alimony,” where Lambert channels rage at an unfaithful husband into a delicious concoction of silly rhymes and gleeful trash talk. Lambert has always been drawn to cornpone humor, not always to potent effect, but this lurid slice of domestic drama may be the most uproarious thing she’s ever recorded— right down to her howler of a punchline: “If you’re gonna leave me in San Antone/ Remember the alimooooo-ny!”
Lambert— who has been married to police officer Brendan McLoughlin since 2019— has always been able to make a meal out of romantic dysfunction, yet a few of these new songs occupy a more positive emotional territory. One of the best is “January Heart,” a surging ode to the transfiguring power of love.
Even with such fleeting moments of contentment, Lambert inevitably circles back around to her habit of prodigal wanderings, the central thematic thread that’s connected many of her best albums. If anything it’s surprising that it took her until now to write a song called “Run,” which feels like the album’s most candid, unvarnished sentiment. “This freedom I found, baby, sure wasn’t free,” she admits, living with the consequences of being unmoored, unbeholden to anyone. A rambunctious cover of David Allan Coe’s “Living on the Run” provides a satisfying bookend.
Past Lambert albums have gone deep on this theme. On 2019’s underrated Wildcard, she owned up to her tabloid image as a serial relationship-seeker: “Maybe it’s the chase that makes me tick,” she mused. “Still waitin’ on the one to give my whole damn heart to.” Her breakup masterpiece, The Weight of These Wings, went deeper still, using the open road as a metaphor for spiritual quest— and casting Lambert as someone searching for a love stronger than all her regrets.
That level of subtext, that narrative heft, is a big part of what makes Lambert so singular— one of the most reliably gifted record-makers of her era. “You’d have to look pretty far and wide to find anyone in music who has been as consistently good or eternally enjoyable as Miranda Lambert,” Jon Dolan recently wrote in Rolling Stone. Her catalog includes not just one but two of the all-time great country albums— The Weight of These Wings and 2007’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, both masterful testaments to the breadth and power of country music storytelling.
Postcards from Texas, though thoroughly pleasurable, doesn’t offer quite the same emotional ballast as those classics, acknowledging Lambert’s personal mythology but never revealing anything new. In a broader sense, the album suggests an artist who’s well into her craftsman era, refining her approach rather than charting new territory. At its worst, that means the album can feel like a retread— especially on “Wranglers,” a scorned-woman anthem from the undisputed champ of scorned-women anthems, here reduced to a limp remake of “Kerosene” or “Gunpowder and Lead.”
But even a second- or third-tier Miranda Lambert album is bound to be exemplary in the quality of its writing, singing, and playing. Postcards from Texas succeeds on a modest scale, celebrating the country lineage of Lambert’s home state with palpable affection. That alone makes the album a minor delight— and Lambert an artist worth following no matter where her wanderings lead.
My rating: 7.5 out of 10.
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