Miranda Lambert—Postcards from Texas
The best country artist of her generation heads back home and eases into the second act of her career.
Postcards from Texas marks a number of firsts for Miranda Lambert. It is her first album for Big Loud/Republic, her new label after spending the better part of the past twenty years at Sony Nashville. It is the first album she's cut in Texas since she headed out to participate on Nashville Star, the long-forgotten country ripoff of American Idol that was instrumental in her rise to fame. And it is the first album of hers to not crack the Billboard Top Ten since her debut Kerosene back in 2005.
The very existence of Postcards from Texas, an album where she shores up her Lone Star State roots, suggests Lambert realized the moment where she started to ease away from the Nashville spotlight. Reuniting with Jon Randall—they previously formed a ramshackle trio with Jack Ingram for The Marfa Tapes—Lambert set up camp in Austin's Arlyn Studios, then set out to write and record an album steeped in Texas tradition. Lambert is intent on framing the album as something of a return to honky tonks: as reported by Natalie Weiner in her Texas Monthly profile on the singer/songwriter, Lambert insisted that the show she played at the indoor stage at Stubb's Bar-B-Q represented a "full circle" back to her beginnings. On occasion, Postcards from Texas does seem lit by beer lights yet it's notfilled with hard-driving music made for dusty dance halls; it's far too smooth for such settings.
That veneer of studio gloss effectively does make Postcards from Texas a bridge between Nashville and Red Dirt philosophies, an idea that plays slightly better in theory than in practice. Much of the album proceeds at a comfortable gait, a pace that's a bit too swift for ballads and too slow for rave-ups. There's an equal emphasis on the compositions and production and while Lambert and Randall never succumb to contemporary trends, the polish does tend to soften the smart songwriting; tunes glide by instead of digging under the surface.
Fortunately, there's a heavy dose of playfulness threaded throughout Postcards from Texas. The record even starts on such a high note, opening with the gleeful bullshit of "Armadillo," whose fanciful tall tales are later countered by the sharp barbs of "Alimony." Jaren Johnston of the Cadillac Three co-writes the stomping "Bitch on the Sauce (Just Drunk)," a tune whose kick is rivaled by a lean, funky cover of David Allan Coe's "Living on the Run." Some of the slower material cuts a deep impression, too: "January Heart," a collaboration between Brent Cobb and Neil Medley, sighs with a gentle ache and "Looking Back on Luckenbach"—joining "Alimony" as the second of Lambert's two co-writes with Natalie Hemby and Shane McAnally here—is a gorgeous bit of neon balladeering, sounding as if it could've slipped onto the radio alongside George Strait in the early 1980s.
Like Strait, Lambert has turned into a reliable record-maker, the kind of musician whose occasional lulls are camouflaged by committed performances and studio pros. Postcards from Texas contains too much swagger and style to truly be classified as a lull yet it definitely feels smaller and safer than the albums Lambert released on Sony Nashville. Part of that is due to Lambert's deliberate decision to swap Nashville for Texas, a move that downplays modern flair in favor of a greater emphasis on craft. She winds up with an album that's sturdy, not stylish, the kind of record that isn't bound for the top of the charts. Instead, it's the debut of Lambert as a career artist, the opening salvo in a second act where can be counted upon to satisfy, not thrill.