Many years ago, a young, up-and-coming country singer crooned about how “they say you can’t go home again”, of leaving home, moving on and doing the best you can. ‘The House That Built Me’ went on to become Miranda Lambert’s biggest hit at the time – and still remains one of her most iconic. But now, 20 years into her career and a bonafide superstar, Lambert has left Nashville to go back home, to her native Texas, rediscovering herself in the process.
Think of Lambert’s aptly titled tenth album, ‘Postcards from Texas’, as life lessons told through vignettes of a roadtrip across the Lone Star state. (It’s also where she recorded the album, her first time doing so since her independently released self-titled 2001 record.) In some moments, she’s happy just sitting with the nostalgia of a memory (the geography-driven ‘Looking Back on Luckenbach’ and ‘Santa Fe’). During others, she’s vulnerable and regretful of the chaos wrecked by her free-spirited ways (the gorgeous solo-written ‘Run’ and self-aware ‘Way Too Good At Breaking My Heart’).
At the heart of this homecoming of the prodigal daughter is the lush ‘No Man’s Land’. Here, she warns a man about how she is free, and they can love her if they must, but trust her to remain true to herself: “So love her like a Mustang / Like a wild thing / Better let her run free.” That is very much the essence of the record, of someone who’s comfortable in her skin as a wildflower, acknowledging all the baggage that comes with it, but also finding a second wind with partners (be it co-producer Jon Randall or husband Brendan McLoughlin) who embrace the mess with her.
Never one to drown out her music with too much earnestness, though, ‘Postcards from Texas’ can be as cheeky as it is sincere. Whether it’s Lambert gleefully daring a cheating lover to continue stepping out (“What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine / So go on, baby, have a real good time,” she sings on ‘Alimony’, with a brilliant play on the word “Alamo”) or a far-flung tale of a chance meeting with a pot-smoking, gun-toting stranger on the run from the “coppers” (‘Armadillo’), they are right at home with the sassiest of her hits.
Lambert is feisty, funny and free on ‘Postcards from Texas’, which feels like the singer no longer has anything to prove to anyone. It might fall back on genre tropes every so often – of course, there’s always that one song about setting shit on fire (‘Wranglers’) or drinking a little too much (‘Bitch On The Sauce’) – and can be a little too ballad-heavy, but the country superstar’s tenth album is as charming as it is witty and stirring. After a long time away, Lambert’s finally back home, wholeheartedly herself and basking in that self-assuredness.
