Miranda Lambert‘s new album Palomino is available now!
Miranda says “The making of this record has been one of the most fun and creative experiences of my career.”
It was the time when everything was shutdown that Miranda and her team got the musical ball rolling on Palomino, “Luke Dick, Natalie Hemby and I went out to my farm in Tennessee in 2020 and started writing songs… We figured, while we have time, let’s get out to the country and see what happens. The first one we wrote was ‘Tourist’ and that set us on a path to create something with a bit of a theme.”
Miranda adds, “‘Tourist’ was the first song we wrote for Palomino and it set the tone for the record. I’ve toured, but I haven’t really gotten to be a tourist. This is the song on the record I want to live out the most.”
Miranda says, “Since we couldn’t travel at the time, we decided to go on a journey through songs…You’ll visit 36 different places as you travel through this record. You’ll meet tons of characters like Katie with a K and the trucker Dwayne. You’ll get acquainted with old friends, like ‘Geraldene’ and visit places we’ve already been together like ‘Waxahachie’. Enjoy the trip y’all.“
When it comes to her favorites on the album, Miranda says it’s the one filled with puns that she loves, “One of the songs that to me, is so clever, and like funny, and simple, but a little complex is ‘Country Money’…I wrote that with Aaron Raitiere and Mikey Rogers and I just loved it. That song, to me, has little Easter Eggs of like puns in it, and stuff.”
Of the 15 tracks on Palomino Miranda Lambert had a hand in co-writing 14 of them.
The one song Miranda didn’t write is also the album’s only cover song – “Wandering Spirit” – which is originally a Mick Jagger tune, “I’ve loved ‘Wandering Spirit.’ I’d already heard it a long time ago, and thought it was so cool, you know, probably like on a playlist somewhere, like what is that? And so I knew the song existed and I knew what it was about. And I just never would have thought to like, cover it, you know, or that I could even find a way to do it my style but then once this record was this record, it was like we have to have it. You know? If it wasn’t a cover would probably name the whole thing Wandering Spirit because it just really encompassed what we were trying to do. Of course, Mick Jagger did it better.”
Palomino from Miranda Lambert is available now – and it includes her current single “If I Was A Cowboy” – which was the result of Lambert collaborating for the first time with someone she’d never written with before, “I’ve met a new friend in the last year and a half Jesse Fraser. Who’s really well…I mean, he just won songwriter of the year. He’s well acclaimed songwriter…we’re friends of friends, but never really hung out, and he was like, ‘hey I have a date open you want to write today?’ And I was already pretty much done with writing for Palomino. But we were still cutting. And our first time to write together. He played me this really cool Country and Western track, which I loved. And I was like, that’s fun. And we wrote, ‘If I Was A Cowboy.’ And it was like, beginner’s luck, I guess. Because it was first time we’d ever written together it was just us two. And I was like, man, this song fits this vibe, too. Like, it was kind of like the cherry on top, I guess. And it was something I was missing feel-wise. And so I sent it to Luke (Dick) and Jon (Randall). I was like, I know we have a couple more days in the studio. I’d love to give this a whirl. And, you know, it really feels like the girl that singing ‘In His Arms.’ This is also her song. You know? And it fit right in there. And I love that song. So you mean the whole record as a whole. It’s like seven writers, you know, and we didn’t do that for any reason, except it was a vibe and it was, we were keeping it tight because we had a vision of this map and we wanted to make sure we stayed on track.”
Miranda Lambert’s Palomino is available now.
Photo Credit: Robert Ascroft