Welcome to Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. Here, Patrick Redford, Lauren Theisen and special guest Brandy Jensen honor Wings Week with a chat about country star Miranda Lambert's 2016 double album, The Weight Of These Wings.
Lauren: It’s impossible for me to talk about Miranda Lambert without starting on a page from Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—a book I have lovingly referred to as The Catcher in the Rye for trans girls. This is Maria, our protagonist, ranting at James, a Walmart employee, after she just drove cross-country from New York in a manic haze:
Anyway it turns out, though, that once you leave New York, which nobody should ever do, haha, j/k, the only things you can consistently get on a twelve year old car stereo are NPR and country stations. And have you ever listened to NPR? It’s soothing for a while, but eventually it makes you want to call in and cuss somebody out until you cry. It wouldn’t get onto the radio, because I guess they have enough lag time to dump out angry people who call up and lose their shit, but it turned me off NPR for a while. Which means country station after country station for the last four days. And I’m not some New York jerk who thinks country music is for yokels or something—I’m into it, I get it. I even think it’s kind of nice that country singers are so fucking convinced of their own sincerity that they don’t do any of the tortured artist, I don’t care if you like me it’s art, man posturing that all the indie rock kids do. And they don’t spend all day telling me about how tough and rich they are, like the rappers on the radio do. Except, James H., there is also a lot of dumb shit on country radio. ‘I’m so much cooler online?’ ‘She thinks my tractor’s sexy?’ I guess it’s funny the first time. But! But!
Maria has followed James over to the country music section and is jabbing her pointer finger toward his chest.
I guess, she says, Miranda Lambert isn’t the biggest star in the country sky, because I’ve only heard the radio play her a couple times. But I think all her songs are about burning down cheating ex-boyfriends’ houses and, like, shooting your abusive ex in the face? The first time I heard that song I was like, Finally! Someone is just coming out and threatening to kill her asshole boyfriend, right there on the radio! Not that I think anybody should kill anybody else or anything, but after five days of country radio, consider me brainwashed. Miranda Lambert, James H., is the punkest shit on the radio, and I am going to drive my car off a cliff if I hear the song about how the guy hopes he gets a chance to live like he was dying. Ever again. Not because I don’t like it though—because it’s so sad and true that it makes me want to live like I was dying and then, like, die. So, James H., Miranda Lambert is a contingency plan to save my life.
Nevada, Imogen Binnie
The main song she’s talking about here is, I believe, “Gunpowder And Lead,” which includes the anthemic line "his fist is big but my gun's bigger / he'll find out when I pull the trigger." It's part of a relatively small subset of Lambert’s catalog—unhinged rock songs about wronged, tough, intense women who won’t take this shit without a fight. It’s a bachelorette banger just like “Goodbye Earl.” But The Weight Of These Wings, released in 2016 following a divorce, isn’t a karaoke-ready double album. It’s got a fun M.O.R. country twang in a lot of spots, especially toward the end, but it’s clearly an attempt at a very serious, respectable record that makes a statement about Lambert as an artist and not just an entertainer.
Brandy: Even though I’m a long-time country fan, I’ve never listened to much Miranda Lambert—I think precisely because I’ve always (maybe incorrectly) associated her with the vibe you describe above. Like Taylor Swift with an NRA membership, I guess? I was very pleasantly surprised by this album, which I had also never listened to for the even more specific reason that I thought there is simply no way Blake Shelton is worth writing a double album about. But it turns out not to really be about him at all! At least not in any overly bitter or vicious way. It’s much more grown-up and self-reflective than I had assumed it would be going in.
Patrick: That’s more or less where I ended up with it as well, though I’d never really listened to her or anyone from her cohort of mid-aughts country stars before and came in expecting to have it all wash over me without grabbing any purchase. It’s the attitude she brings to the breakup record as a genre concern that I liked most, this sort of self-reflective distance she’s achieved to be able to hit a pair of lines like "When the Romeos and Juliets / Have bummed all of my cigarettes" with the right amount of ruefulness. There is only so much subtlety any songwriter can wring out of the catharsis of heartbreak, and I appreciated that this album’s temporal point of view was more about what happens next.
Lauren: I’m sort of the opposite of you guys, in that I think Taylor Swift with a gun sounds kind of exciting—as a writing persona, to be clear, not a literal killer. A stock answer I used to have when people asked if I liked country music was something like, “I like old country music and modern country songs sung by women.” While too many guys on the radio sounded disgustingly content with their lives of denim and gasoline, a lot of the women stayed furious and dangerous—not just Lambert’s crazy ex-girlfriend character but also Carrie Underwood smashing up headlights with a baseball bat or having one-night stands with a guy whose last name she doesn’t know. That snarling passion is something I always gravitate toward in music.
Brandy: I think maybe a better way to say what I mean is that I expected a lot of brashness from these songs, and what I found instead was the sort of humility that comes after being brought low by heartache. While I love a breakup anthem with a clear villain, this felt like a real reckoning with why a person makes the choices they make.
Lauren: Would it be fair to say that the first half of the record (“The Nerve”) is the home of the most self-reflective, clear-eyed songs, and then the second half (“The Heart”) is where Lambert gets a little looser and carries more of that traditional country charm? If so, it seems like you two preferred The Nerve?
Patrick: I didn’t like the back half nearly as much, though maybe that has less to do with the songs as songs on “The Heart” and more with the simple fact that 94 minutes is a lot. I was pretty surprised to see that “Tin Man” was the hit from this album. It felt like 11th-grade Wicked knockoff shit. The statute of limitations on Wizard of Oz homages expired sometime during the second Bush administration. Sorry!
Lauren: I kind of hate “Tin Man,” too. It grates on me.
Brandy: Yeah that wasn’t a highlight for me either. But I would say the work of “The Nerve” is how she earns the fun of “The Heart,” if that makes sense?
Lauren: It does! And I believe Lambert had already rebounded from Shelton into a relationship with Anderson East by the time this came out. I’m ready to go to bat for that back half. But “Vice,” closer to the front, is the stunner. The lyrics are pretty straightforward down-and-out stuff, but Lambert just remains in this exhausted, burnt-out emotional state on the vocal and forces you to really sit with her sadness. It’s a beautiful melancholy, and it’s the album’s most direct hit.
Patrick: Anderson East, that’s a crazy-ass name.
Brandy: “Vice” is so good. I also love “Runnin’ Just in Case” as an opener, setting up this theme she comes back to about the difference between escape and moving on. There's lots of motion in this album, and as someone who has long said it’s actually super possible to run away from your problems (just get in the car and go somewhere else! It helps!) I was into all that.
Patrick: Motion is exactly it. “You Wouldn’t Know Me” was a highlight off the front end, mostly for the sense of humble confidence she expresses about the pace at which she is changing after deSheltonification. Even if she's not totally sure what sort of person will emerge on the other end, she has an appreciation for the process. Again, the agony of the the forest-fire phase of a breakup is a universalish emotion that’s motivated some of the best songs ever written—though the accelerated regrowth that happens in its wake is more formative and longer-lasting—and I liked hearing her live in that moment.
Brandy: I mentioned earlier that I was surprised by how grown-up a lot of these songs feel, and I kept coming back to that as I was listening. This is the ache of a woman who has been hurt a few times already, and may be again—not the shock of someone who just got dumped by their college boyfriend. She takes a certain amount of responsibility for where she has found herself and what she plans to do about it. As someone who is currently nursing a banged-up heart I can appreciate both the vulnerable tenderness and the kind of searching for what went wrong that isn’t strictly about apportioning blame.
Lauren: And it feels more genuine, too, than the extreme, loud pain of “Mama’s Broken Heart” or “Gunpowder And Lead,” those earlier hits. I really can’t stress enough how much I love those songs and get a kick out of those exaggerated emotions as a form of catharsis. But by dialing it back a notch (and getting really ambitious about the size of the record, too), Lambert takes off the costume, in a sense, to document heartbreak as she’s truly experienced it.
Patrick: As the least countryfied member of our trio, I gotta talk about how much I liked how this record sounded. There’s much more depth than I expected in the music: woozy guitars, a commitment to texture, a hit that the producer tried to make sound like a Siouxsie and the Banshees song. Careful listening is rewarded here. What did you two make of this album’s sonic palette, and how did it fit into or expand your conception of Lambert as a genre artist? My sense of country, having only scraped up against it, is that it’s a lot like horror. It’s the most committed to and steeped in specific signifiers of genre that singers are always aware of and referring to. This might sound stifling, though in the case of horror, the sense of lineage is energizing and allows for greater subversion. I guess what I am saying is that I need some help framing this all.
Lauren: That's a good connection between country and horror movies, but I think where they differ is in the conception of who the audience is. Country music is more of a defined subculture that extends to politics and consumerism, and if I ask you to picture an arena-level country crowd, I think you'll more easily conjure up an image of a certain group of people than if I asked you to think about a sold-out house at a horror premiere. I believe on one hand, there's a pressure to serve that specific culture, and you can see it even on this album in some of the folksy metaphor choices and this down-to-earth presentation of Lambert. Those tropes can be a wall for some people who don't feel like they fit into country culture. But if you're willing to give it a chance—say, if you're driving to Nevada and don't have anything else to listen to on the radio—there might be something that connects with your own feelings.
Brandy: She really took advantage of doing a double album. There’s a great mix of different kinds of country sounds here, from the traditional, honky-tonk style of “To Learn Her” to something more country pop-forward like “Pink Sunglasses.”
Lauren: I adored that phony false-start on “Bad Boy,” which comes in a breezier back stretch of the album. It’s so much of what’s compelling to me about the big business of country music—a totally scripted moment of “authenticity” on an expensive production that’s nevertheless a fun way to kick off a song. Maybe it’s a touristy thing for a New Yorker to say, but all of these little cliches on “The Heart” in particular were really charming to me. These lyrics start the midtempo plucker “For The Birds”: “I'm against the days / When the skies stay bummer-grey / And the cake just tastes okay, okay / Well, I guess I'm anti-yuck / Against the stuff that sucks / The life out of your soul / And shuts it down.” There’s nothing profound here, but it’s comforting. Putting these tracks on an album that also feels so vulnerable enhances the whole package rather than watering it down. It’s like getting a craving for a cheap beer after drinking a bunch of craft.
Patrick: That’s a good way of putting it, Lauren, and the way she weaves those threads of cliche into her specific vision are necessary, comforting grounding that make the rest of the stuff hit. Also, the thing about cliche is that sometimes it fits like a glove: a trope like the scorned girl with a gun is not really something that needs to be transcended, it’s better as a touchstone.
Lauren: Or, sometimes, a party-starter.
Defector's Favorite Jams Right Now
Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)
Every few years, my heart becomes a little wayward and restless and can only be soothed by one thing: listening to Gillian Welch’s 2001 Americana masterpiece Time (The Revelator) on repeat for a minimum of one week. This is one of those times. It’s not exactly an underappreciated album—most people I know also consider it a triumph—but it’s always somehow even better than I remember. It’s both wide-ranging and tender, forward-looking (even prophetic at times, as with “Everything is Free”) and steeped in history. It contains the best song ever written about losing your virginity (“My First Lover”). Welch gets solo credit, but it’s decidedly the work of both her and longtime partner David Rawlings—a testament to what can occur when two people pay exquisite attention to one another.
-Brandy Jensen
Kesha - "JOYRIDE"
Over the July 4 holiday, I drove to Atlantic City to cross a concert off my personal bucket list: I got to see Kesha live for the first time. It was a great show, if a bit short. The crowd was eating up every single song, from every era of her career, and there was a celebratory theme to it all. Kesha is finally free of her recording contract with her alleged abuser, Dr. Luke, and just about an hour after the show ended, she would release her first song as a “free woman,” as she noted multiple times through the show. Hell, I even got a blurry yet visually appropriate photo of her posing in front of the word FREEDOM at the start of the concert:
“JOYRIDE” is the first song to come out of Kesha Records, and though she didn’t play it live at the show I attended—she said that she had finished it just two days earlier and they had not rehearsed it enough to play it live—it’s a cathartic release meant to throw off the era of her life dominated by the link to Dr. Luke. Whether “JOYRIDE” is good or not is besides the point; the song is Kesha’s return to autonomy.
“JOYRIDE” is, to put it kindly, a mess. It’s a callback to early Kesha, the “TikTok” and “Blow” Kesha, which can be fun, but it’s missing the big hook and dirtbagginess that made those songs so charming even as they were admittedly very annoying. If anything, the new song’s biggest link to that earlier Kesha is that it feels like recession pop—it’s unhinged, it feels like last call at the club, it sounds like a hangover is about to blow your head up in the morning. Frankly, it’s obnoxious.
Still, though, I can’t stop listening to it! How does she do it? There’s a certain reckless abandon to the silliest Kesha songs, and even though the Kesha of 2024 has gone through it, it’s still nice to hear that she can put out a song like “JOYRIDE.” While her songwriting has matured immensely since she burst on the scene, she’s still the same Kesha that once stylized her name with a dollar sign. Will “JOYRIDE” become a mainstay in my Kesha binges, which happen about once a year? Probably not, but for now, I’m glad it exists.
-Luis Paez-Pumar
Grateful Dead - "Visions Of Johanna" (7/8/95)
I'm not especially proud of this, but I have a kind of sick rubbernecking compulsion toward the trainwreck that was the last days of the Grateful Dead—the mid-90s point where a stadium-level touring business in the shape of a band just burned itself out and stayed running only on the fumes of nostalgia and the pressure of addiction. I like a lot of Dead songs, but they aren't exactly my guys. My white-hot take is that they were best when they stuck to melodies with lyrics, and I prefer the sturdier backbone of Phish's scientific improvisations to the Dead's looser, more impulsive jams. I take a certain fascination, regardless, in the way a group that achieved real beauty from the late '60s into the early '80s mutated into a society of predatory drifters and party zombies. That's how the story I'm told goes, at least.
Through this old blog, I came upon the last time that Jerry Garcia performed a Bob Dylan cover—7/8/95 at Soldier Field, a month before his death. Breathtaking guitarist that he was, Garcia was also a legendary mess by this point, and his unhealthy, disoriented state is typically cited as the primary reason the band struggled to click in this ugly era.
I've mostly just repeated other people's opinions so far, but here's what I can say for sure: Garcia doing "Visions Of Johanna" here is shockingly lovely. It's delicate and restrained but also magnetic enough to draw in an entire football stadium. Rather than foreshadowing tragedy, Garcia's age as he sings and plays seems to project everything he's learned in all the performances that came before it. He looks old but not beaten, channeling that trickster seer persona of Dylan's into one more good memory for his worshipers—and a shred of proof that there remained some bright spots even at the end.
-Lauren Theisen
Omar Apollo - God Said No
The new Omar Apollo album is really good, just as the last two Omar Apollo albums were really good, though this one is—I hesitate to throw around a word like "mature," so I will say—more developed than either of the last two. I suppose that the thing that's made him pop is his real-yearner-ass lyrics and exploration of the contours of heartbreak and longing, but for me it's the timbre of his voice. The texture is like a chunk of granite being polished smooth by a tumbler. He has such command of his instrument, and if I were to pick nits, the only real one would be that I wish he would sing in Spanish even more often. Also, feel free to skip through the slower, aching ballads and the Pedro Pascal monologue. The Giorgio Moroder-ass third track is the high point.
-Patrick Redford
