Miranda Lambert has won nearly every country music award — none of them is her proof she made it
Seven CMA nominations this year, a co-write on the longest-running No. 1 in Hot 100 history, a brand-new album — and Miranda Lambert's personal yardstick for success has nothing to do with any of it. It involves a stage, a costume and somebody else performing her songs.
Miranda Lambert told Rolling Stone, in a feature published Monday, how she knows an artist has made it. It is not a trophy or a chart position. It is a drag queen.
She means it literally. To tease her new album this summer, she threw a Crisco Disco Drag Brunch in Nashville. Her rule:
"If someone dresses like you and covers you in a drag show, to me, you made it."
Crisco came out October 2: Seventies country run through a disco ball, with an Ella Langley duet up front and the Chris Stapleton collab "A Song to Sing." Lambert, 42, summed up the logic as "what's to lose?" Not everyone is dancing: Saving Country Music gave it 6.7 out of 10 and called it "all crust, and no filling."
The feud nobody remembers starting
The interview also buries one of country's most-discussed feuds. Kacey Musgraves co-wrote Lambert's "Mama's Broken Heart," and the two were rumored to have beef for over a decade. Then Musgraves put Lambert on "Horses and Divorces," and Lambert admitted, per Wide Open Country, that neither can recall what the fight was about: "Some dumb girl drama?"
The timing is not subtle. Lambert has seven nominations at the November 18 CMA Awards, and Variety counted four of them for her work on Langley's records. Her co-write "Choosin' Texas" just lost No. 1 on the Hot 100 to Taylor Swift after a record 24 weeks.
Monday's other drop has a deadline
At 11 a.m. Central on Monday, Lambert added a bonus track to Crisco, and the fine print is the fun part:
- The song: Rosanne Cash's 1981 No. 1 "Seven Year Ache," with Parker McCollum.
- The catch: it only comes with the full album, only on iTunes, where Crisco is marked down to $5.99.
- The clock: the offer ends Thursday, October 8, at 11:59 p.m. ET.
- The math: Billboard's tracking week runs Friday to Thursday, so that is the night Crisco's first chart week closes.
The King, the bar and Sylvester Stallone
Like Dolly Parton, Lambert prefers to stay out of partisan politics, Rolling Stone notes. Texas legends are another matter. At last year's Kennedy Center Honors, where she saluted George Strait, the hotel bar closed early, so her husband, ex-NYPD officer Brendan McLoughlin, wheeled in bottles, roped off chairs for "the King" and snubbed a fellow honoree:
"I would rather Sylvester Stallone kick my ass than the wrath of you for me not taking care of the King."
Her own grievance that night was smaller. Security banned aerosol cans, and going without hair spray is not an option for a woman who is, as she put it, "from Texas."
Previously we wrote: The Lorne documentary has a Netflix release date — Tina Fey, Conan and Chris Rock do the talking, because SNL's Lorne Michaels won't
