Miranda Lambert’s music has always existed in extremes. Throughout the Texan’s previous five albums, she has established herself as a no-nonsense country-pop troubadour whose response to emotional turmoil could be separated neatly into kerosene-fueled revenge fantasies and “American Idol”-ready torch ballads. Right from the start, however, it’s clear that The Weight of These Wings is a different type of album for Lambert. “I’m looking for a lighter, I already bought the cigarettes,” she sings in “Runnin’ Just in Case,” the album’s majestic opening track. It’s a subtle lyric, but it’s indicative of her change in perspective: to put it simply, finding the fire has never been the problem for Lambert. Alas, things have changed.
Although it arrives in the wake of her high-profile divorce from Blake Shelton, The Weight of These Wings is a breakup album refreshingly devoid of spite or anger. Instead, it’s a thoughtful concept record, more focused on moving on and growing up than lashing out or telling all. Throughout its twenty-four songs, Lambert analyzes herself and her choices, often while on the road: It’s more Hejira than Blue, more “Shelter From the Storm” than “Idiot Wind.” The pensive tone of the lyrics is reflected in the album’s stark, unglamorous production. Despite coming from one of the highest-paid, most successful country artists on the planet, Wings makes precious few ploys for pop radio. There are no millennial whoops or 1989 synths. Instead, the album is distinguished by a rootsy stomp akin to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers—another long, post-divorce statement that used its sprawl to mimic the messy mental state of its creator.
While Wings is a double album in the traditional sense (it’s a good seventeen minutes longer than Metallica’s recent one), it does away with the clutter usually associated with the form. The album’s most experimental track is also its most traditional—the pitch-perfect classic country of “To Learn Her”—and it’s most throwaway moment, an easily editable false start to the groovy “Bad Boy,” is charming and self-aware. The mood throughout the album is staggeringly consistent, and its separate halves (titled “The Nerve” and “The Heart,” respectively) feel like less a means of distinguishing their sounds than identifying their subtle shift in tone. While “The Nerve” finds Lambert losing herself in travel (“Highway Vagabond”), drinking (“Ugly Lights”), and a pair of cheap sunglasses (“Pink Sunglasses”), “The Heart” is less hell-bent on escape. In “Six Degrees of Separation,” Lambert flees to New York City only to be haunted by an ad for a litigation attorney, plastered across a bus stop bench. Such is the narrative of The Weight of These Wings: the landscape of America starts to resemble your mental geography the more closely you identify what you’re looking for.
Even with the tremendous growth Lambert shows as a songwriter, she remains true to herself and her past work. The choruses still arrive precisely when you want them to. The references are cozily predictable (getting “on the road again” requires a Willie Nelson namedrop, naturally). “Kitchen sink” still rhymes with “diesel tank.” And Lambert maintains her trademark style of country-girl self-mythologizing in a way that feels both fresh and funny. In the boozy garage rock of “Ugly Lights,” she’s “the one who doesn’t need another one,” begrudgingly bumming smokes to folks younger and more sober than her. In “Vice,” one of at least five tracks on the album that feels like its show-stopping centerpiece, she leaves town simultaneously spitting in its face and winking at the camera: “If you need me/I’ll be where my reputation don’t precede me.”
While Wings is hardly a showcase for any kind of vocal gymnastics, Lambert’s voice remains the star throughout. She can switch from a soulful vibrato in “To Learn Her” to a scratchy howl in “Pink Sunglasses” with equal confidence. She drawls with eerie detachment in the snappy “Highway Vagabond,” which sounds a little like “Send My Love (To Your New Lover),” if Adele was less interested in letting go of her ghosts and more in letting them ride shotgun. “Get off one and get on the other highway,” she sings in the chorus, “Well if we ain’t broke down then we ain’t doing something right.” It’s a sentiment that’s echoed in the album’s closing song “I’ve Got Wheels,” when Lambert’s endless driving sounds like self-empowerment: an excuse to move forward. Alone at the wheel, she sounds steady and weightless, like she finally knows where she’s going.
