It’s a Sunday afternoon in Nashville, and fans have crowded into the top floor of Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa Tex Mex + Cantina on Lower Broadway for a pop-up show to celebrate the release of her new album Postcards From Texas. Pink neon block letters spell her name on the wall behind the stage, giving the space a soft, glowing hue. The album has been out only three days, and she plans to sing it top to bottom.
Lambert walks out at 5 p.m. in a white cowboy hat, turquoise fringe, and the broad smile of a woman who just defiantly rebooted her music career—at 40 years old.
After nearly two decades together, Lambert left Sony Music Nashville in March of 2023. One year later, the proud Texan announced she had signed with Republic Records and that Nashville’s Big Loud would provide country radio promotion and marketing support. Her debut single with the new label, “Wranglers,” came out in May, and Postcards from Texas, her 10th studio album, arrived in September.
“I feel like, after 20 years of doing this, I still have this crazy amount of inspiration and fire,” she tells American Songwriter. “I think it’s because I have a new team that’s fired up with me. It’s a game changer when you have a support system who’s leading with art, who’s excited with you and for you.”
Lambert’s vision for Postcards From Texas came into focus at her 40th birthday party. Last September, Lambert’s friend and backup singer, Gwen Sebastian, asked her where she wanted to turn 40. Lambert told her making that decision felt like pressure. Sebastian asked the singer if she wanted to turn 40 in Texas. Her answer was yes.
“Now that you mentioned it, because I felt like I kind of want to go home,” she says.
Lambert took over Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, Texas, one night when the famous bar was closed for her celebratory bash.
“That was the start of ‘I know what I’ve got to do now,’” Lambert says of what she called her “aha moment.” “You know what I mean? I really want to just get back to the heart and the root of it all. Not that I ever left it at all.”
Lambert contacted longtime collaborator and producer Jon Randall and asked if they could go to Texas to see how creative they felt. She didn’t have a plan, and it wasn’t a big production. She wanted to round up some musicians they both liked and see if Arlyn Studios was available near her home in Austin, Texas.
“As soon as we got in there, I was like, ‘This is right,’” she says. “‘This feels right to me.’”
Lambert feels like the songs on Postcards From Texas could have been on her past albums. Lambert is one of this generation’s most renowned singer/songwriters, but she firmly believes in recording outside songs. Some of her biggest hits—”House That Built Me,” “Mama’s Broken Heart,” and “Little Red Wagon” included—were written by other people. With that in mind, she contacted her songwriting friends and asked them to send her songs for her new album.
“I want to hear what they’re doing,” she says. “I think it’s so important. If I didn’t have outside songs, I would not have the career I have. I would not have the set list I have. It’s important to me to stress that to young artists. If I tried to write every single thing we ever cut, we’re probably robbing ourselves of some gems.”
Aaron Raitiere sent Lambert “Armadillo,” which he wrote with Jon Decious and Parker Twomey. When she received it, she was in Austria with her husband, Brendan. She put her AirPods in her ears, hit play, and immediately thought, “This is it. Here we go.”
Then she gave her AirPods to her husband, whose reaction was the same.
“He was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah, now we’re rolling,” she says. “I knew the first time I heard it that I wanted to cut it. It gives me chills talking about it. I don’t know if it’s synchronicity, serendipity, or all of that, but it felt right. My gut had been leaning towards this and pushing me home.”
The armadillo with a doobie and a coldie in a koozie had me drivin’ to the county line / And I know it sounds crazy, but please believe me, baby, I swear that’s where I was last night.
The song is as country as Lindale, the northeast Texas town where Lambert grew up.
“Miranda Lambert is as real as it gets,” says Jessie Jo Dillon, who wrote Lambert’s Parker McCollum duet “Santa Fe” with her dad, songwriting legend Dean Dillon, Jesse Frasure, and Lambert. “She has such a reverence for songs, songwriters, and for the person. That’s a little bit different than everybody else.”
Dillon describes Lambert as raw, funny, and one-of-a-kind. “I think she is so important for this genre and always has been because she’s not being anybody but herself,” Dillon continues. “I think that’s why she connects and always has so much. That’s why it was so cool that she wanted to work with my dad and me.”
“Santa Fe” is one of Lambert’s favorite songs on Postcards From Texas. Frasure told Lambert that Dean was in town and was interested in writing with her. Lambert was excited to add Dillon to the appointment because she used to write songs with her dad, and she was interested in the Dillons’ writing dynamic. She hoped to get a song that sounded like every George Strait hit that Dean wrote—and she did. Dean went there naturally.
Lambert thought “Santa Fe” would be a sweet duet and reached out to fellow Texas native Parker McCollum to join her. She said he loved it.
“I think that song is so special,” Lambert says, and Dillon agrees.
Dillon recently spent an extended period on tour with Brooks & Dunn. She played the unmastered version of the song to Ronnie Dunn, and he cried.
“He sent me a long text the other night about how amazing he thinks that song is,” Dillon says. “That was really cool to see one of me and Miranda’s idols love the song so much. I think that says everything about her, too, that she’s always been making music that young people and her icons love.”
Lambert wrote “Dammit Randy” with her husband, Brendan McLoughlin, and Randall. The Randy in the song is Randy Goodman, Chairman and CEO of Sony Music Nashville, Lambert’s former record label. The singer didn’t intend to write “Dammit Randy” with her husband, but he kept throwing out lines while watching a football game. Lambert told him he had to choose—songwriting or football.
“Honestly, who better to write that with than someone that you’ve been coming home to every day for months talking about something you’re going through,” she says. “Brendan had lived that with me. It’s that good old adage of ‘if you piss off a songwriter, well, it’s fair game.’”
Brent Cobb and Neil Medley wrote “January Heart,” another of Lambert’s favorites on the album. Frank Liddell sent the singer the lilting mid-tempo, which she describes as different than anything she could write.
“I just thought it was so beautiful,” she says. “I just thought, ‘What a beautiful love song, but still with some darkness and some mystery. Those are the kinds of songs I’m looking for. I can’t write this. I wish I could have, but this is just so different melodically than anything I would’ve thought of or message-wise.”
Lambert wrote “Run” alone in 2015. Everyone in her circle of friends had heard it and kept asking if she was going to record it. Randall and McLoughlin convinced her that now was the time. Her husband told her he would quit supporting her if she didn’t.
I’m trying to survive in this state of defeat / Is it you or I that really lost me? / I’m lookin’ for someone I wasn’t with you / We held on for dear life, babe, but both of us knew I was gonna run.
“I don’t know if that was subconscious, I wasn’t ready, or just because I didn’t have a good home for it, but I felt like it was ready,” she says. “I’ve tried to have a song that I wrote by myself on every album because it’s important. But it’s scary. There’s nowhere to hide. It’s me and my rawness.”
With the album available now, Lambert can look at the finished project and know it was a reset for her. Postcards From Texas is her thinking about where life and career started, getting back to her Texas roots, and remembering what that felt like.
“I’ve been doing this 20 years,” she says. “I’m going to go back to the start and rekindle that whole fire and soaking all the things that made me chase this in the first place. Now we’re rolling again. I feel like this record is setting up the next decade of my life.”
