In the two decades since his revenge-fueled breakthrough single, “Kerosene,” Lambert has achieved just about every type of success an artist can achieve in the country music industry. With his new album, Criscoshe says her goal is to reach new levels of stardom.
Robert Ascroft
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Robert Ascroft
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 youthful image, the scrappy young Texas singer-songwriter wore a steely gaze and a fitted “Mama Tried” tank top, in homage to Merle Haggard, as she played the role of a woman taking revenge on her unfaithful lover by burning down his property.
In a way, she was also sending a message to the country music industry: No one should expect them to happily conform. “Forget your high society,” she sang caustically, “I’m soaking it in kerosene.”
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Last year, Lambert marked the 20th anniversary of “Kerosene” on the Academy of Country Music Awards show by reframing his song as a duet with Ella Langley, an ascendant superstar a decade and a half his junior. Sporting a replica of Lambert’s tank top for the occasion, Langley swapped lines with his predecessor. The two sang the chorus in unison, leaning into each other and bumping hips playfully. And all the while, Lambert, no longer presenting himself as such an intractable individualist, could not help but smile.
She had even more reasons to smile in 2026, not least because she was instrumental in helping Langley create the biggest song of the year in any genre. “Choosin’ Texas” is a retro ballad that nods to the early ’80s. Urban Cowboy elegance, and Lambert co-wrote and co-produced it. The huge country hit also broke pop chart records, much to Lambert’s delight.
In the well-appointed basement living room of her managers’ offices, just off Music Row, she took a moment to reflect on the boundless popularity of a song that unambiguously registers as country: “If that’s 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 it out, let’s do it! I love it.”
His own new album Crisco evokes the sensibilities of past eras when, in the spirit of expansion, 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.”
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It may be a thrown line, but the tone of his speech implies a lot. I’ve interviewed Lambert several times over the years and have never heard her so relaxed and amused by the improbability, 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 experienced the notable evolution that Lambert has, both as an artist and a citizen of the industry community, over the past two decades. For years, Lambert has been determined to succeed in the country mainstream while maintaining her artistic standards, holding the line on her hard-edged approach to undiluted twang, edgy, rocking energy, and salty wit. Gradually, however, she refined her approach enough to achieve her goals: conquering country radio, headlining and winning numerous Grammy, CMA and ACM awards, as well as platinum sales. And critically acclaimed thanks to the strength of his albums. She managed to become a superstar without shedding her fascinating idiosyncrasies.
What he wasn’t interested in at all was crossover pop. But she began to admire 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 husband. “All they were playing was Reba and Dolly and Loretta and all these remixes on the video screens, and everyone was dancing like crazy,” she remembers. “I always say I want to be (like) them, but I didn’t that“.
Lambert made the decision to ask a Nashville producer named Jesse Frasure to remix one of his songs. Frasure, a seasoned specialist in bridging country and pop who uses the name DJ Telemitry, transformed her modern honky-tonk number “Tequila Does” into a tropical house track.
This kicked off the unlikely songwriting partnership between Lambert and Frasure. “I hate to call her brave,” Frasure says in the suburban ranch-style home where he makes much of his music, “but it’s a brave decision to make these kinds of pivots and work with someone like me.”
Lambert always relied on the guitar as his primary songwriting instrument and had to get used to programmed tracks and loops. “I started to like it, but 10 years ago I was like, ‘I’m not doing this,'” she muses, adopting an overly stubborn tone.
During one of their writing days, she and Frasure invited Chris Stapleton to 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 seems natural,” Lambert marvels, “which shocks me too. It’s not ‘three chords and cry in my beer’ – that’s my norm – or ‘burn your house down’.”
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She embraced post-disco soft rock so readily that she and Frasure explored further down that path, eventually writing the rest of the songs on this new album, Criscowith the exception of its only cover, Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song”. To guide them, Frasure created a playlist he called “Mirandapolitan.” He pulls it up on his studio desktop, places his cursor over Glen Campbell’s 1975 classic, “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and scrolls through. “I really loved the era when country music was playing with pop sounds and arrangements in the ’60s and ’70s, and even the early ’80s. So there was a lot of Glen Campbell. There was even Marty Robbins, his later stuff playing with string arrangements, or Lee Hazelwood or Nancy Sinatra playing with sort of pseudo western disco moments.”
“So it’s not all countrypolitan,” he continues, “but some of the stuff we put on that list was just to help us live in the melodic sensibilities of the chord changes of that era.”
At Blackbird Studios, a prominent Nashville facility where Lambert has recorded several other projects, Frasure made it a point to arrive early and set up disco balls and colorful, swirling accent lighting. “I’ve never done that before,” he emphasizes. “No one does that. Usually you go in there and it looks like a (normal) recording studio and you do your thing.”
Both Lambert and Frasure thoroughly enjoyed being drawn into this aesthetically demanding creative process, which produced extravagant, silky textures, radical 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 of delivering with a joke or a bit of vinegary, well-placed emphasis. But all that listening to vintage, lush sounds drew Lambert’s attention to a different goal: creating romantic melodies on the big screen that she’d never attempted before. “Not with as much intention and drama,” she notes.
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For Lambert, evoking dance floor fantasies is, in part, a way of following in the lineage of Dolly Parton and other female country stars in reaching out to her LGBTQ+ fans with this club-ready music. And like Parton before her, Lambert relishes the idea of inspiring drag performances. “If I’m successful at drag shows and I’m a fixture there,” Lambert says, “I feel like that’s another level of icon, and I’ll pursue that, for sure.” At CMA Fest last June, she debuted some of her new songs at a rooftop Crisco Disco drag brunch, an event that shared its name with a famous New York gay after-hours club in the ’70s and early ’80s.
In “Snakeskin Boots,” the film’s scintillating, cinematic opening Crisco album, Lambert cast Langley opposite her in a glamorous diamond heist scenario set in vintage Los Angeles. At the same time that Lambert is revamping her aesthetic, she’s also helping Langley, her wider protégé, achieve a real breakthrough in pop culture. Lambert contributed mightily to Langley’s hit album Dandelion as a writer and producer. And as Langley weathers the whirlwind that comes with his hit single, “Choosin’ Texas,” topping the all-genre chart Billboard Hot 100 longer than any other song in history, Lambert encourages it. “I want to sit here at home on my porch with a…
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