She's country music's shooting star
 | Life in gun culture infuses Miranda Lambert's songs. (kevin winter/getty images) |
She's country music's shooting star
NEW YORK - Miranda Lambert is the most dangerous-sounding woman in country music. She's also No. 1 with a bullet. So you have to ask: Miranda, are you packing heat?
"Can't tell you," Lambert twangs. "That's why it's called a concealed weapon."
Asking Lambert about her armament is a legitimate question. The country starlet's new album, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," opens with the raging "Gunpowder & Lead," in which she sings of delivering a shotgun-pellet payback to an abusive man. She wrote the chorus' kicker - "I'm gonna show him what a little girl's made of/ Gunpowder and lead" - during a concealed handgun class back home in East Texas.
"Miranda has lived in gun culture all her life," explains her father, Rick, a retired cop and private investigator. "I'm a firearms collector and hunter. She was taught to shoot when she was a little bitty girl. So it's natural for her to put a gun in a song. But she's not a gangsta talking about shooting cops and bonking women on the head. She's talking about real things that happen to real people."
Miranda Lambert, who performs at the Tweeter Center today, specializes in rough-and-ready music: drinkin' songs and breakup songs and bloodthirsty revenge fantasies about, say, torching a cheating boyfriend's abode ("Kerosene") or starting a bar brawl over a former flame ("Crazy Ex-Girlfriend").
The 23-year-old singer and songwriter can come across like a loose cannon with a Texas-size temper onstage, too. Remember that performance on last year's Country Music Association Awards that ended with Lambert looking all wild-eyed as she smashed her Gibson Epiphone? So not Nashville nice!
"Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" is a stunning recording that's brimming with energy and personality. Featuring 11 superlative songs, eight written or co-written by Lambert, the album flirts with perfection and might well be the best new album you'll hear all year, in any genre. As on Lambert's 2005 major-label debut, "Kerosene," the music on "Crazy Ex" isn't safe or glitzy or designed for maximum mainstream appeal. It's raw and full of verve, with lyrical depth.
Lambert is nobody's Nashville puppet and certainly isn't the product of any sort of Music Row assembly line. She writes most of her own songs, cranks up the volume in concert, and is headstrong enough that shortly upon signing a record deal with
Smartly, the suits acquiesced: Though country radio gave Lambert a relatively cool reception, "Kerosene" entered Billboard's country album chart at No. 1 - just the sixth time a new artist had done so - and went on to sell nearly 900,000 copies. She celebrated by buying a 400-acre hunting ranch and a John Deere tractor.
Lambert and her kid brother grew up in Lindale, roughly 80 miles east of Dallas, population 3,370. After Rick Lambert retired from police work, he opened a private detective agency with his wife, Beverly. The Lamberts were often hired on child-custody and divorce cases - work that provided Miranda with a wealth of source material.
At 16, Lambert heard a radio ad for the True Value Country Showdown. She was accepted into the competition, and though she lost, she was encouraged by the feedback. She cut a demo in Nashville, but says the songs she recorded were "awful" and "cheesy."
Lambert released an independent CD and continued to do hard time on the Texas music circuit, with her mother handling her booking and her dad sometimes paying the band with his own money. In 2003, Lambert tried out for a new USA Network talent show, "Nashville Star," and floored the program's producers.
"We knew we'd found someone special who'd really help put the show on the map," says H.T. Owens, an executive producer. "She was this incredible 19-year-old ingenue from the heartland of Texas who had so much talent." Lambert didn't win, but "Nashville Star" put her on an accelerated schedule to country stardom.
While Lambert has an effective voice, her true strength is her songwriting, which was deeply informed by her parents' work. That was especially true on "Kerosene."
"When I was writing for that album, I was 17 to 20 years old and I didn't have a lot of life to write about," she says. "I feel like I've lived a lot more and I feel like I have more soul to me than I did when I was 20. So a lot more of this album is me. But not all of it. 'Gunpowder & Lead' isn't me. It's more like a mini-movie, though I'm not saying I wouldn't be like that if it came down to it." 
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