Miranda Lambert came out of the gate with a me-against-the-world attitude. In the video for her 2005 single "Kerosene" that established her early image, the scrappy, young Texas singer-songwriter wore a steely-eyed glare and a fitted "Mama Tried" tank top, in tribute to Merle Haggard, as she played the role of a woman exacting revenge on her cheating lover by torching his property.
In a way, she was also sending a message to the country music industry: No one should expect cheerful compliance from her. "Forget your high society," she sang caustically, "I'm soakin' it in kerosene."
Last year, Lambert marked the 20th anniversary of "Kerosene" on the Academy of Country Music Awards show by reframing her song as a duet with Ella Langley, an ascendant superstar a decade-and-a-half her junior. Sporting a replica of Lambert's tank top for the occasion, Langley swapped lines with her predecessor. The two of them sang the hook in unison, leaning into each other and playfully bumping hips. And all the while Lambert, no longer registering as such an intractable individualist, couldn't stop grinning.
She's had even more to smile about in 2026, not least because she had a hand in helping Langley create the biggest song of the year in any genre. "Choosin' Texas" is a throwback ballad that nods to early '80s Urban Cowboy sleekness, and Lambert co-wrote and co-produced it. The massive country hit has also broken pop-chart records, to Lambert's delight.
In the well-appointed basement sitting room of her managers' offices just off Music Row, she took a moment to reflect on the boundless popularity of a song that registers as unambiguously country: "If this is what brings people to country music and they can stay a while and understand that we've been cool the whole time and they just figured that out, let's go! I love that."
Her own new album Crisco summons the sensibilities of past eras when, in a spirit of expansiveness, country music absorbed pop production techniques such as sleek, propulsive grooves and lush orchestration. "A country disco record," Lambert laughs, "that wasn't on my bingo card."
That may be a tossed-off line, but the tone of her delivery implies plenty. I've interviewed Lambert a number of times over the years, and had never heard her sound so relaxed and amused by the unlikeliness, at least on paper, of her own current career moves.
Continuity is one of country music's central values, and few of its luminaries have undergone the notable evolution that Lambert has, both as an artist and a citizen of the industry community, across the last two-plus decades. For years, Lambert was single-minded in her drive to succeed in the country mainstream while upholding her artistic standards, holding the line on her hard-edged approach of undiluted twang, wiry, rocking energy and salty wit. Gradually, though, she fine-tuned her approach enough to achieve her goals: winning over country radio, headlining arenas, and earning numerous Grammy, CMA and ACM awards, platinum sales and critical acclaim on the strength of her albums. She managed to become a superstar without shedding her riveting idiosyncrasies.
What didn't interest her in the slightest was pop crossover. But she did begin admiring the expanded musical reach of some of her iconic predecessors when she partied at a New York drag bar during World Pride in 2019 with her brother and his husband. "All they were playing was, like, Reba and Dolly and Loretta and all these remixes on the video screens, and everyone was dancing their ass off," she recalls. "I always say I want to be [like] them, but I haven't done that."
Lambert took the step of commissioning a Nashville producer named Jesse Frasure to remix one of her songs. Frasure, a veteran specialist in bridging country and pop who uses the DJ name Telemitry, transformed her modern honky-tonk number "Tequila Does" into a tropical house track.
That kicked off Lambert and Frasure's unlikely songwriting partnership. "I hate to call her ballsy," Frasure says at the suburban ranch-style house where he does much of his music-making, "but it's a ballsy move to do these kinds of pivots and work with somebody like me."
Lambert had always relied on guitar as her primary songwriting instrument, and had to get used to programmed tracks and loops. "I've started to love it, but 10-years-ago-me would be like, 'I'm not doing that,'" she muses, adopting an exaggeratedly stubborn tone.
During one of their writing days, she and Frasure invited Chris Stapleton to come over and join them in creating what became "A Song to Sing," a feel-good duet inspired by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's early '80s classic "Islands in the Stream." "It feels natural," Lambert marvels, "which is kind of shocking to me, too. It's not 'three chords and cry in my beer' — that's my norm — or 'burn your house down.'"
She took to the post-disco soft rock feel so readily that she and Frasure explored further down that path, ultimately writing the rest of the songs for this new album, Crisco, except for its lone cover, Jim Croce's "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song." To guide them, Frasure created a playlist that he titled "Mirandapolitan." He pulls it up on the desktop computer in his studio, places his cursor on the 1975 Glen Campbell classic "Rhinestone Cowboy," and scrolls. "I really loved when country music was playing around with pop sounds and arrangements in the '60s and '70s, even early '80s. So you had a lot of Glen Campbell. You had even Marty Robbins, his later stuff playing with string arrangements, or Lee Hazelwood or Nancy Sinatra playing with kind of pseudo western disco moments."
"So it's not all countrypolitan," he goes on, "but some stuff we put on this list was just to kind of help us live in the melodic sensibilities in the chord changes of that era."
At Blackbird Studios, a top-flight Nashville facility where Lambert has recorded several other projects, Frasure made it part of his production duties to arrive early and install disco balls and colorful, swirling accent lighting. "I've never done that before," he emphasizes. "No one does that. You usually go in and it feels like a [regular] recording studio and you do your thing."
Lambert and Frasure each thoroughly enjoyed getting swept up in this aesthetically exacting creative process, one that yielded extravagant, silken textures, sweeping string arrangements and supreme polish.
One of Lambert's great gifts as a singer and songwriter is her mastery of tone of voice and inflection, her way with a wisecrack or a bit of vinegary, well-placed emphasis. But all of that listening to lush, vintage sounds shifted Lambert's attention towards a different aim: crafting romantic, wide-screen melodies she hadn't attempted before. "Not with this much intention and drama," she notes.
For Lambert, conjuring dance floor fantasies is, in part, a way to follow in the lineage of Dolly Parton and other female country stars by reaching out to her LGBTQ+ fans with this club-ready music. And like Parton before her, Lambert relishes the thought of inspiring drag performances. "If I make it into drag shows and I'm a staple there," says Lambert, "I feel like that's a different level of iconic, and I'm chasing it for sure." During CMA Fest this past June, she showcased some of her new songs at a rooftop Crisco Disco drag brunch, an event that shared its name with a storied NYC after-hours gay club of the '70s and early '80s.
In "Snakeskin Boots," the glistening, cinematic opener of the Crisco album, Lambert cast Langley opposite her in a glamorous, diamond heist scenario set in vintage Los Angeles. At the same time that Lambert's been retooling her aesthetic, she's also been helping Langley, her protégé in a loose sense, achieve a true pop culture breakthrough. Lambert contributed mightily to Langley's hit album Dandelion as writer and producer. And as Langley weathers the whirlwind that comes with its blockbuster single, "Choosin' Texas," topping the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart longer than any other song in history, Lambert's cheering her on. "I want to sit here at home on my porch with a glass of wine and FaceTime her wherever she is in the world and hear about all of her journeys," Lambert says of the younger artist, "because I went on some of those already — and I'm a little bit tired."
Having any sort of presence on the pop chart is as new for Lambert as dabbling in disco influences. "You don't get many firsts when you're 23 years in," she observes. "You just don't." At her career's midpoint, she's really gotten into assisting new artists — not just Langley — in finding their footing. Lambert signs rising Texas talent like Dylan Gossett to Big Loud Texas, the record label imprint she co-founded with close collaborator and fellow Texan Jon Randall, and packs her schedule with songwriting sessions for others' projects. "I didn't really have other artists writing songs with me," she observes about her early years in the industry, "or sowing into my life in a mentorship way. I feel like I'm supposed to do it."
Frasure, who's spent nearly a quarter-century working in the Nashville publishing world, has seen how rare it is for a big name like Lambert to embrace a supporting role. He explains that when a previously unreleased song by a country star shows up on another artist's album, it's usually "because something [they wrote] didn't make their record and one of the publishers is pitching the song around," he says. But Lambert has become one of the seasoned pros that he regularly calls on to do co-writes with newer acts. "The amount of intimidation if you write with a young person [who's fixated on the fact that] Miranda Lambert's in the room …" Frasure begins. "[But] she has the ability to make them feel comfortable. She doesn't speak over them. She doesn't make them feel steamrolled in some sort of 'I know more than you' way."
Which says a lot about Lambert's mentality these days. "I mean, I feel like I'm the same exact person," she chuckles, "just calmed down a little bit."
And not opposed to smoothing things out musically for a change.
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