When Miranda Lambert walks on to the massive stage at AT&T Stadium
, part of her would much rather be back in the tiny Dallas-Fort Worth honky-tonks where she started out a teenager.
“I just had this conversation with Kenny about how sometimes we want to bring it back to when it was small and intimate and exciting, with just 200 people there,” Lambert says during a break from her summer-long stadium tour with Kenny Chesney.
“The [stadium] shows aren’t easy. It’s definitely not created for music, per se, and getting used to the echo is a challenge. But I feed off the feedback from the crowd,” she says. “It’s incredible how many people come to celebrate country music and that’s very exciting.”
The other big challenge for Lambert is trying to open for Chesney, a non-stop dynamo who sprints and dances across the stage like a country-pop Mick Jagger. One of the top-grossing performers of the 2010s, Chesney has headlined JerryWorld four times in the last five years.
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“He has so much energy, it’s crazy
Lambert says. “He gives it his all every time he goes onstage, and it’s inspiring to me. Seeing him makes me go ‘I’ve gotta work a little bit harder.’”
Lambert says she's been pouring most of her energy lately into writing and recording songs for her seventh studio album – her first since 2014's Platinum, which debuted at No. 1 on the pop charts and won the Grammy for best country album. It will be her first record since her high-profile divorce last year from Oklahoma country singer Blake Shelton.
Given Lambert’s penchant for twangry tunes about ex-lovers (“Kerosene,” “Gunpowder & Lead,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”), don’t be surprised to hear some frank lyrics about Shelton on her next CD. Although Lambert declines to get specific, she promises to lay it on the line.
“I’ve always been honest in my songs, and this one won’t be any different. I’m using my life for my art,” says the 32-year-old singer.
“I think I’m getting lyrically better, pushing myself to be more honest … Now more than ever, I’ve been able to home in on that.”
She also hopes to record a third album with Pistol Annies, her critically-acclaimed side project with singer-songwriters Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley.
“Trying to wrangle three girls together is hard sometimes when everybody’s putting out their own records and getting married and getting divorced and everything else,” she says. “But I love the project so much and I definitely want to make another record at some point.”
Since her divorce, Lambert has moved to the Nashville area and closed her Pink Pistol boutique in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, just north of the Texas border, where she and Shelton lived on a sprawling ranch. Shuttering the Oklahoma store allows her and her mom to expand their Pink Pistol outlet in her hometown of Lindale, Tex., 80 miles east of Dallas.
“They’re moving to a new location in Lindale, a real bad-ass place, in August,” Lambert says. “I love Nashville and being close to all the songwriters I write with, but my roots are in Texas and I get home quite a bit — in fact, I’m going camping on the river next week with my friends and family in South Texas.”
Just don’t look for pictures of her trip on Instagram. Although Lambert uses social media to promote her albums, she’s not a fan of it in general.
“It gets on my nerves real bad … It drives me crazy sometimes, to be honest with you."
"I catch flak because I don’t post that much, but I don’t feel like everybody needs to know what I’m doing all the time and I don’t need to know what everybody else is doing all the time,” she says.
"I actually deleted my Twitter and Instagram off my phone for a couple of months and it was amazing. I read Willie [Nelson]'s book, played with my dogs, and did life stuff without waking up and going to the habit of 'What else do I click on right now?' It was actually, like, peaceful."
