Wednesday, February 23, 2011

On the Truly Excellent Miranda Lambert

This past Sunday Miranda Lambert was robbed.  She did take home a Grammy Award for “Best Female Country Vocal Performance” for “The House that Built Me”—an award she surely deserved.  But the award for country album of the year went to multiple-winners Lady Antebellum for Need You Now.  I like that album and its eponymous single a good deal.  But I don’t love it.  I understood why when I read Jody Rosen’s recent take on Lady A in Slate.  The subheadline of the article christened them “the dullest band on earth” and Rosen suggested that “the group's defining quality is a kind of nebulous in-betweeness.”  This kind of banality was the perfect tonic, says Rosen, for the very immoderate age in which we live.

I certainly don’t begrudge Lady A their success.  They are certainly capable songwriters (if a bit unoriginal).  They even co-wrote a very sweet song with Lambert on her album (“Love Song”).  But Rosen is right: this is a band that you lavish with only a moderate amount of affection.  I do not feel the same way about Miranda Lambert’s Revolution.

Released on September 29, 2009, this is an album that rewards you with repeated listenings.  Its not that its a staggering work of genius—or even that every song is of unimpeachable craftsmanship.  But on the whole, this album is one of the most touching and quietly profound country albums I’ve listened to.

First, we have to discount a couple of songs which are fun diversions but not integral to the main action of this album.  “White Liar” is a too-brassy specimen of Lambert’s revenge fantasy oeuvre; “That’s the Way that the World Goes Round” is her obligatory novelty song cover (though, like Gillian Welch’s “Dry Town” from her previous album, Lambert choose a grade-A songwriter to cover in John Prine).

The rest of the album is absolutely enthralling.  I’ve discussed “Makin’ Plans” and “The House that Built Me” on this blog before.  Both deal with the dangers of straying too far from home.  “Makin’ Plans” is about being content with what’s familiar and “House” is an attempt to recapture some sense of place.  Another song on the album takes the complete opposite approach.  “Airstream Song” is about always being on the move.

Sometimes I wish I lived in an Airstream
Homemade curtains, lived just like a gypsy
Break a heart, roll out of town
‘Cause gypsies never get tied down

The music for it is also quite spectacular.  It features a slightly odd amorphous introduction that sounds like the instruments are just tuning up before launching into a loose-limbed take on alt-country Americana.  That a VERY commercial country artist makes room on an album for these kind of Brooklyn-based hipster-chic musical textures is fascinating.  What’s more, however, is that Lambert doesn’t at all adapt any kind of ironic pose.  She’s quite serious, and not in a falsely pious country way.  She’s managed to find a middle way between sentimental commercial country schlock and the kind of fake-folksy shenanigans of urban redneck poseurs.

Even songs which could take the album into truly awful Red-state jingoism, like “Time to Get a Gun,” have such a winking kindness that you just smile even if you disagree with her politics (she grew up the daughter of private eyes, so she’s earnestly an NRA supporter).  What helps is Lambert’s acknowledgement of her politics in relation to the liberal Northeast.  But rather than adopting Country’s usual befuddlement at city-folk ways, Lambert suggests a rapprochement.

So let’s shake hands and reach across those party lines
You’ve got your friends just like I’ve got mine
We might think a little differently
But we got a lot in common you will see
We’re just like you
Only prettier

Her last chorus states that “I’ll keep drinkin’
And you’ll keep gettin’ skinnier.”  How can you not love this?  Clever, fun, culturally aware—appropriating American musical idioms and subverting them with contemporary cultural messages—graduate students will be lining up to document this.

Typically, however, they’ll likely focus on how she embodies some kind of post-feminist ideology and not discuss what I think is her true aim: to capture the sense of living in a post-place world.  A sense of dislocation is present in each song—dislocation from the ideal relationship, from one’s home, from one’s culture.  She confronts a burning question: unbound from any strictures and with limitless choice what makes you happy?  Revolution touches on how this impacts every aspect of our lives.  How we relate to the land, how we look after our neighbours, how we find love, how we find peace with ourselves.  No album in my recent memory more deeply touches the cultural moment in which we live. 

County is often blamed for being culturally regressive.  I’ve rather loved its ability to bring some poetic dignity to our everyday struggles, but I’ll concede that sometimes artists can affect a nostalgia that I don’t share.  But here Lambert has harnessed the most beautiful aspects of the country idiom to our cultural moment.  Listen to this album and it will cut you to the quick. 

But best of all, Lambert brings you great solace as well.  “Heart Like Mine” is about a Christian girl who doesn’t quite live up to certain strict interpretations of good Christian living.  She’s in a place like a lot of us: struggling to square what we are with we and others would like us to be.  But this girl has hit on quite a good idea regarding her slightly immoderate alcohol consumption.

Cause I heard Jesus, He drank wine
And I bet we’d get along just fine
He could calm a storm and heal the blind
And I bet He’d understand a heart like mine

No more Christ-like words have ever been set to music in country.  I love this woman.