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Miller Mobley
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Miller Mobley
Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley are back in the Pistol Annies saddle, guns blazing.
After a lengthy hiatus from the platinum-selling side project, the country music stars are releasing its third LP, Interstate Gospel, on November 2 via Sony Music Entertainment. And similar to the trio’s critically acclaimed last recorded effort, 2013’s Annie Up, the album boldly lays bare stories from their personal lives through expertly-written songs.
“When we get together, something happens,” Monroe says. “It seems like songs just come out into the air, and we get really excited when we get to hone in on it.”
The band decamped to Lambert’s farm in Primm Springs for a few days in April on “a mission to write” after they completed Gospel’s wistful ballad, “When I Was His Wife,” over text earlier in 2018. The casual reunion occurred in a hectic time for each member—Monroe had her first child in August 2017 and released her fourth solo album, Sparrow, in April; Presley was several months into the pregnancy of her second child; Lambert had released two No. 1 albums since Annies had taken their break.
“Pistol Annies lends a part of its artistry to all of us individually, in crazy ways,” Monroe says. “You know, it’s truly all threeof us together in each of the songs. So it definitely couldn’t have hurt my other work in any way to be associated with something so special.”
The first two years of Pistol Annies’ existence (the supergroup formed in 2011), its members tended to their solo careers while pastoring classic country themes in its debut and sophomore albums. Hell On Heels and Annie Up, respectively, quickly garnered a reputation of shrewd writing coupled with a roots country feel, assisted by occasional honky tonk-style instrumentation. But Lambert and Monroe’s careers followed separate momentums, and with the success of Monroe’s Like a Rose and Lambert’s Four the Record, the outfit unofficially disbanded in 2013.
“We still kind of talked, and it was always assumed that, ‘when we have a second, let’s write,’” Monroe says. “But we all started kind of feeling it at the same time. I mean, I was coming out of the woods of having a baby, and it seemed like we were coming to a clearing. It just felt like it was time.”
After the writing session at Lambert’s farm, Annies linked with producer Frank Lidell (Eli Young Band, Lee Ann Womack) to buff the songs. Reminiscent of the songs from Hell On Heels and Annie Up, the tracks on Gospel celebrate the everyday lives—sometimes whimsical and sometimes love-wrought—of Southern women. “Cheyenne” illustrates the tumultuous night-life of a woman who’s ditched the fidelity of love for the pleasure of short-lived romance. “This Too Shall Pass,” the album’s closer, paints a painfully honest picture of a woman grasping for the good in a relationship through the bad. Each singer carries significant weight in the delivery of the profound stories, perhaps because they’ve lived them themselves.
“If any of us goes through something, we feel like its our job to write about it,” Monroe says. “We’ve never been shy of writing about real things. That’s the gift of music. You can help people get through these things and know they’re not alone, whatever the situation.”