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In order to make her fascinating new album, The Marfa Tapes, Miranda Lambert got about as far from Nashville as she could.
The poetic soul of the project simply demanded it. But sitting in a sunny, wood-paneled room at her Middle Tennessee farm, golden hair pulled up by a red handkerchief and three dogs snoozing at her feet, the superstar says not to read into that. Her heart belongs here. “Really, Nashville is home to me—and being a Texan, that’s a big thing to say,” she says with a laugh, just a few weeks shy of the project’s May 7 release. “I spent eight years in Oklahoma and then I moved back to Nashville in 2015. When the wheels touch down at BNA I feel at peace.”
In many ways, that easy feeling has led to the most artistically compelling period of Lambert’s career, including her third Grammy win at this year’s awards where she took home Best Country Album for 2019’s Wildcard. Never one to rest on her laurels, Lambert further spreads her wings and dives into new layers of her craft on The Marfa Tapes. Written and recorded at a real-life creative oasis deep in the heart of The Chihuahuan Desert, the project finds Lambert partnering with fellow Texans Jack Ingram and Jon Randall to catch creative lightning on tape. Fifteen songs are captured in their purest, totally raw state, in a bare-bones celebration of song that only an artist at her peak could pull off.
In truth, it’s all about leaving civilization behind and losing yourself in music. But while escaping Nashville’s gravity was a necessity, in some ways, Lambert’s newfound home made it possible. Back around 2004, the Texas native lived in town for a year after appearing on the USA Network’s music competition show, Nashville Star. But unlike many of her peers, she didn’t stay. Lambert moved back to Texas as her career took off, keeping a healthy distance between herself and the seat of country power. The move helped allow her to stay unique. Chasing her musical muse instead of industry trends, superstardom followed over five acclaimed albums. And when Lambert did come back, it was as a fully formed icon. (Albeit one with a broken heart following her very public divorce from fellow country star Blake Shelton.) Now, Nashville wasn’t a scary place dangling the keys to her destiny—it was more like a massive music resort. And with new ties to the city still forming, she’s more at peace here than ever.
“When I came back and was sort of rebuilding after I got divorced, I bought a farm outside of town and got all my babies,” she says, referring to her beloved brood of animals. “I kinda got all my ducks back in a row, so to speak. All my animals—my dogs and horses—and [my husband] Brendan. It’s really good, because it feels like a big city full of people who are likeminded and just have a passion for country music. That’s such a family network to be a part of, and you don’t realize you’ll miss it until you’re not here.”
Coming back in 2015 was like a reawakening, she says, a creative renaissance in the wake of her divorce. It led first to the stunning double album The Weight of These Wings, then 2019’s Grammy champ Wildcard, and now The Marfa Tapes. Lambert says it all stems from getting reacquainted with Music City’s magic.“I think it’s because of the people here,” she muses. “I’ve got amazing friends, and when I moved back here, I was on eleven. I started writing with everybody every single day, texting someone, ‘Hey do you wanna come hang and write?’ I just was excited to be back in the network of friends I had met over the years. Being on the road all that time, I missed it so much. I didn’t realize I was missing that creative energy that this town has until I got back.”
One of those friends was songwriter and producer Jon Randall, and along with eclectic Texan singer-songwriter Jack Ingram, the three of them forged a powerful partnership. Feeling connected on some deeper level, they eventually began retreating to the Texas desert town of Marfa for open-ended writing sessions, checking out of the real world to make music with no distractions. What they made would become The Marfa Tapes. Ranging from campfire ballads filled with timeless Western heartache to Latin-inflected two steppers with a “border-town buzz,” each track is presented in its native habitat. The trio traveled back to Marfa to record them in full acoustic simplicity last year, aiming to reveal both the energy of the setting and an unfiltered look at song creation, so now creaking chairs, gusts of wind and random conversations share space with Lambert’s all-natural vocals.It’s basically the exact opposite of how music is normally made. And that was the point.
“If you’re a creative, you sometimes get caught in the weeds of life and everything else,” Lambert says. “But in Marfa, there’s nothing else to do but listen to what comes in. It’s like a place to rest your brain, but on the other hand, songs flood in as soon as you get out of your car. It’s like a vortex.” “Jon’s been telling me about it for years, so eventually I called him and said, ‘Let’s go see Jack, and just drive to Marfa,’” she goes on. “We ended up getting there at 4 a.m., and you know that song, ‘The stars at night are big and bright / Deep in the heart of Texas’? They wrote that song about the Marfa sky. It just grabbed me, and I was like, ‘Oh, I get it now.’”
“I’ve always been in love with that part of the world, and we had about four or five magical experiences down there hanging out, just the three of us,” Randall adds, joining in via video call. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles and miles, hundreds of thousands of acres without anybody or anything, and there’s something extremely magical about it.” “The whole point was just to try to share that, which is a little bit daunting to do,” he says. “It’s one of those places that you can’t take a picture of because the photograph never looks like what it is. So, we’re probably crazy for trying to capture that in songs and put it on a record. But hopefully people can hear a little bit of what that’s about.”Recorded with three microphones, three voices, and one guitar, the songs were allowed to “just be,” and whatever was captured is what the album became.
At various times, Lambert, Randall, and Ingram all takes turns singing lead, with imperfect-but-incredible vocal performances joining the far-off sound of cows mooing, feet tapping, or even border patrol flying overhead, as happens on “Tequila Does.” Each track sounds like the work tapes songwriters create when they finish a song, and aside from the project’s raw audio and literary lyrics, what stands out most is the artists’ deep connection. They could almost be siblings, carrying on like no one is listening. “I think there’s a level of comfort that allows us to go out there and disappear and get weird if we want to,” Lambert says. “But I also think there’s a level of respect that makes us want to bring our A-game to the table. We’re so different stylistically, but we grew up listening to the same things, and admiring the same kind of lyricists and poets, so there definitely is a family vibe.” “My parents were actually there catering one of our trips, because it’s the middle of nowhere so somebody’s gotta cook something,” she laughs. “My mom said every night when we’d come in for dinner, she felt like her three kids were coming home. We’d be bickering and punching each other, all excited.” That giddy excitement is everywhere on The Marfa Tapes, and in this little family, Lambert is clearly everyone’s favorite.
Her voice floats across the desert like delicate, wispy dust on the lonely “In His Arms.” It soars with easy optimism on “Waxahachie,” and aches the with emotional rust of heartbreak on “Tin Man,” a brilliantly phrased ballad that became a single in 2017, after a stripped-down performance at the ACM Awards. Randall says Lambert’s inner spirit makes each track recorded in Marfa special—even the ones she doesn’t sing. It’s why they wanted to do this in the first place.“I think people don’t realize how extremely down to earth and real she is, and that comes out in her music,” he says. “That’s why she’s willing to do something like this. It reminds me a little bit of when I used to work with Emmylou Harris for years. Emmy would rather raise up everyone around her than take the spotlight for herself, even though she was the star. The whole night was her showing off me and Sam Bush, or Albert Lee and Ricky Skaggs and Rodney Crowell. Miranda has a lot of that, too, because for her, at the end of the day, it really is about the music. There’s a lot of entertainers and a lot of celebrities out there, but she’s a real artist.”
In the end, that’s the message that comes through the clearest on The Marfa Tapes. That modern country is just as much an art form as it is a commercial genre. And that some artists are still talented and bold enough to make those spheres of influence overlap.“People usually wait until they’re old or gone to put out ‘lost tapes’ or whatever,” Lambert says. “But we’re like ‘No they’re perfectly found, and we’re perfectly alive. Here you go.’ Without thinking about it, we just went with our gut.”Back in Nashville, it’s that go-with-her-gut drive that has led to so much respect for Lambert—both in the mainstream and its rootsier fringes. In all likelihood, her impulse will make sure she stays “bigger” than Music City in the best ways possible.
But nowadays it’s also driving another idea, one which could cement her status as a Nashville fixture for good: Her soon-to-open Broadway honky-tonk, the first one named after a female artist in history. Dubbed Casa Rosa (or “Pink House” in Spanish) and currently under construction at 308 Broadway, the multi-level live-music behemoth will join a corridor of tourist favorites already named for Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Florida Georgia Line and others. But just like her, Lambert’s will be different, starting with a unique-to-Broadway mix of femininity and Tex Mex-cooking. Plus an unrivaled tequila bar.
“It’s got pink booths and I took a page out of the Billy Bob’s Texas book, and put a giant rhinestone saddle up, so it’s cool,” she says proudly, perking up at the thought. “It definitely has a little feminine touch for all the gals that are coming. I am the first girl to ever have a honky-tonk on Broadway, so I am super pumped, and I’m gonna make sure all the girls have a little something when they get here.”
Casa Rosa will hopefully open this summer, and just like The Marfa Tapes, Lambert calls it a silver lining to the disastrous year that 2020 was. She’s wanted to do it for years but never had the time, she says, so it’s kind of like the home-improvement projects everyone else took on—just a little more ambitious.Like Randall said, Lambert’s more down to earth than most people suspect, and her love of Broadway goes back to her earliest days.
“I mean, I grew up singing in honky-tonks. So naturally, the first thing I did when I got to Nashville Star was go to Broadway,” she says, calling Casa Rosa another way of making Nashville home.“I think the first time I got like, really good and drunk was at Tootsie’s. One of those needing-to-be-taken-home-out-the-back-door kind of nights, where they’re like ‘Oooookay, you’re done here,’” she says with a laugh. “But I think I’ve earned that as a country music singer.”