spend your midday brain break with miranda & me
🤠 let's go, girls!
Let’s reorient. Because it’s been cold and we needed something to do, my friends and I are tackling Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 50 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century (so far). We’re working from 50 to 1, listening to an album a week, sharing our thoughts with each other as we go (holla at me if you want to join the group chat!). I’m Substacking along the way because I want to follow pop stars around on tour, interviewing them for magazine cover shoot stories. This felt like a good place to start.
Last week, we hit #48: Miranda Lambert’s Platinum, an album I probably wouldn’t have listened to otherwise.
I’m a sometimes country music fan. I went to school in North Carolina, where we wore cowboy boots to football games and drank dollar beers at Country Night on Tuesdays. When I hear George Strait or Eric Church, I’m transported back to sunny Saturdays in Chapel Hill and feel cozy all over. I throw Kacey Musgraves or Chris Stapleton on most playlists; I love Johnny Cash’s letters to June and the way Dolly Parton moves through the world.
Most country music’s just hard for me to connect with. It’s notoriously resistant to outsiders and tougher on its women about how they *should* tell their stories. Its recycled tropes – freedom and beer drinking and creek fishing and shooting cheating husbands dead – are lazier and more obvious than in other genres. Its fiddles and twanging banjos are about as far away from the SoundCloud beats I grew up on as you can get. So, I skip a lot of it.
But, I like Miranda Lambert. She’s a skilled musician with swagger and bite. She took off in the 2010s, when men were dominating the charts with bro-country hits about backroads and beach parties. She found success with songs about her Texas roots and far-from-perfect parts, and a fanbase in folks who loved her realness.
On Platinum, Lambert swings from glossy high-heeled diva (with edge) to just-a-guitar folk singer (with starpower), embodying both roles fully and authentically. At its best, Platinum showcases smart songwriting that’s cheeky and reflective. At its worst, the album leans on tired clichés and over-the-top pop-country sounds that make most of the tracklist skippable.
I loved:
the guitar strum and searing honesty in Bathroom Sink
the Western swing band and lyricism in All That’s Left
“if you think you’re the only one she’ll want in this world/then you don’t know nothin’ about girls” (just the line, not the song)
the call to Patron Saint of Scorned Women Priscilla Presley for counsel
I hated:
everything else
There’s a lot to appreciate on Platinum, even if it wasn’t my favorite. At a time when it would have been easier to sing about koozies and trucks, Lambert instead touches on aging and unraveling marriages. She’s soft-hearted and raw, a special sort of storyteller who makes (some) of the album worth a listen.
P.S. Last week also led me back to The Marfa Tapes, a Miranda Lambert-Jack Ingram-Jon Randall passion project recorded and released during the pandemic. It’s filled with beautiful, stripped down songs about life’s sweetness and ache. I love it every time I listen and think you will too.
P.P.S. This week, we’re listening to #47: K*nye W*st’s The College Dropout. Yikes!