Review: Miranda Lambert’s back in the spotlight at the Greek, and her aim is true
If any celeb-watchers expected Miranda Lambert to pull into town licking her wounds at her first Southern California concert since her very public divorce last year from fellow country star Blake Shelton, they haven’t been paying attention to her career.
If anything, being on the road again seems to have provided a solid measure of healing and solace, at least if the steely determination she exuded through most of her 90-minute set outdoors at the Greek Theatre was any indication.
Strutting on stage assertively following opening sets from Kip Moore and the Brothers Osborne, Lambert exploded into “Fastest Girl in Town,” a celebration of one woman’s declaration that she’s angling for some dangerously good times.
The logo she’s adopted on tour and elsewhere in recent years shows a pair of crossed six-guns with wings, and a running theme in her music is that she’s an artist who doesn’t get mad, she gets even.
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She exhibited plenty of her signature locked-and-loaded feistiness during the show, touching on such hits as “Kerosene,” “Gunpowder & Lead,” “White Liar” and “Little Red Wagon,” songs that spell out in no uncertain terms what a woman who feels wronged might be capable of.
This is, after all, an artist whose microphone stand is built on the stock of a double-barreled shotgun.
What’s made Lambert such a treasure in mainstream country music since her emergence in 2005 is that she has refused to get stuck in one-note-samba mode. The firebrand songs got our attention, but she’s also demonstrated a rarer, and more revealing, capacity for examining the things that hurt.
That’s the direction she’s taken in “Vice,” the recently released first single from her forthcoming sixth album, one she’s described in recent interviews essentially as her divorce album.
She introduced the new song, which she wrote with Josh Osborne and Shane McAnally, midway through the show, telling the packed house it’s about “real things and real feelings.”
“Standing at the sink now, looking at the mirror/Don’t know where I am or how I got here,” she sang.
The prism of her divorce also added new colors to earlier songs such as “The House That Built Me,” the Tom Douglas-Allen Shamblin song that documents experiences and lessons that one by one add up to a life. That 2010 track became her first No. 1 country hit.
Likewise, her reading of Brandy Clark, McAnally and Kacey Musgraves’ acerbic “Mama’s Broken Heart” felt decidedly more personal when she sang it this time around.
Her field of vision, however, isn’t restricted to her own joys and travails. In “Automatic,” which she wrote with Nicolle Galyon and Natalie Hemby, she elevates the overworked theme in country music of waxing nostalgic for the good old days by zeroing in on attitudes such as civility and patience that often seem to have fallen by the wayside.
A rare (at least in mainstream country music) recognition of, and appreciation for, diversity in the world around her was at the core of Phillip Coleman and Don Henry’s “All Kinds of Kinds,” a song she introduced as especially appropriate for her Los Angeles audience.
Even her choice of other artists’ hits demonstrated a connoisseur’s taste in country, pop and rock oldies. She let loose Mountain’s hard-rock classic “Mississippi Queen,” which in addition to giving her band the opportunity to crank the music to 11 brought a valid new spin on the song when sung from a female point of view.
Later she served up the Band’s “Ophelia,” a rollicking romantic lament that’s hard to imagine ever turning up in, say, one of Carrie Underwood’s shows. Or Luke Bryan’s.
While heartache and personal strife aren’t things you’d wish on anyone, if the outcome for Lambert and her new album is more musical illumination on the level of what she’s given us to date, let the tears and the daggers fly.
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