“When I entered the Showdown, I sang two of my dad’s original songs. He had tons, written twenty years ago, and when I started singing, he picked it up again — started writing, and we also started writing together. It was so cool that I brought that back into his life, sort of brought the passion for it back to him, too.”
Several of those songs would appear on her first, self-released CD in 2001 — financed by Rick, even when the money was very tough to come by, saying he’d be spending that on tuition if she’d gone on to college. Several of their father-daughter co-writes also saw national exposure when Lambert appeared — memorably young and talented, but not the winner (she finished third) — on the first, quite competitive “Nashville Star” TV competition in 2003.
That level of being “famous beyond a small town” had some immediate, unexpected effects back home. “It’s so weird,” Miranda relates. “I lost a lot of friends at first. And I was involved in a church, and then I started a country band — and I sort of got chastised for it, at first, pretty bad. It hurt me, because I felt, ‘I’m following my dream here; why is everybody so disgusted with me?’
“I think it was because people don’t know how to understand it. They didn’t know how to understand, ‘She’s not just going to TJC [Tyler Junior College], and live here in Lindale and work at the bank. So what is she doing?’
“I think people didn’t know how to take it. But I think I’ve showed that I’m still — exactly — the same person that left. Actually, I think that I’m a little nicer than I was when I left!”
After the “Nashville Star” recognition, Miranda moved to Nashville and began the process that led to publishing and recording deals with Sony. The path was not a walk, as some may have thought, though Sony executive Tracy Gershon, always Americana-friendly, was a judge that year and sent clear signals of the label’s interest.
“Nine weeks on TV is great, and you can capitalize on it, but reality sets in, and you’ve got to go work,” Lambert says. “It’s different for ‘American Idol’ [where winner Carrie Underwood could go straight to the country charts]; you’re just huge immediately. People say, ‘What’s the difference?’ Well, for one thing, it’s way bigger than ‘Nashville Star’!
“And then I was not in a hurry at all,” she adds. “I had most of my material for Kerosene, but spent a little more time writing, to make it the record I wanted to make since I was 17 — a mainstream record on a major record label. I was 20 at this point.
“I didn’t want to mess it up by rushing it out just because ‘Nashville Star’ was over. I had to treat the record not as a follow-up to ‘Nashville Star’, but as a beginning for the whole rest of my career. I spent a lot of time in the studio, and on radio tours, and people would say, ‘Gosh, it was two years before your record came out; seemed like forever.’ But because I didn’t win, I didn’t have to do it so fast — and that’s what I loved about it.”
How much, it seems fair to ask, of the rebellious small-town Texas kid remains in the platinum-selling country artist Lambert has become today?
“When I made the last CD, I still had a little of that attitude that I wasn’t going to do what they wanted me to do — which worked for me,” she says. “But I’ve learned so much in the two years since that’s been out, that I think I went into it differently with this record.”
Yet there’s no hint of surrendering to the once-supposed Music Row “monster” in that modest compromise. Indeed, the young woman who can wonder “where my music fits in” at times also seems to have a workable, emulation-worthy handle on how the once-warring sides in the country/alt-country divide have come together in 2007, and how it’s possible to make the most of both alleged worlds.
“As it worked out in making this record, I did everything I wanted to do,” she says, “but I also kept in mind that they can’t do their job if I don’t do mine. My job is to make great music, to make every song on there something that I can sing every night onstage. So that is what I focus on — not what type of song it is, or if it’s a single.
“I want to feel like I can go to my label with the record and say, ‘Here, I’ve done all that I can do, making music that I’m proud of and I can sell. And you ought to be able to sell it, too.'”
There’s a confidence and maturity in this that suggests a success she measures in personal terms. Today, her parents are working for her, as she reports happily, “getting to do a job they love instead of something they hate every day, because of what they gave back then.”
Miranda’s newfound level of fame puts her squarely in the world Rick Lambert had dreamed of inhabiting. And she’s handling that, already, with considerable perspective.
“I’ve learned that I wanted to reach for the stars,” Miranda says. “If I don’t make it all the way, and wind up playing bars in Texas when I’m 40 years old, I want to know that I gave it all I had.”
Senior editor Barry Mazor is at work on a book about the musical legacy of Jimmie Rodgers — who adopted Texas as his home — in country, rock and more.
