Miranda Lambert is readying a new album, Postcards from Texas, which will be released on September 13.
The album includes “Wranglers,” a single she released in May that grew comparisons to her songs “Gunpowder & Lead” and “Kerosene.”
Fourteen tracks will appear on the upcoming album, most of which were co-written by Lambert and her longtime songwriting partners Jon Randall, Natalie Hemby, Luke Dick, Jack Ingram, and Shane McAnally. Two newcomer songwriters include four-time CMA Musician of the Year Jenee Fleenor and her husband, Brendan McLoughlin.
He is listed as a co-writer on the second track of the album, “Dammit Randy,” a powerful song about reclaiming her strength and independence after a heartbreaking breakup.
When she first released the song last month, Lambert said,
“This song came out of a conversation the night before Jon Randall and I went into the studio to make this album. We were talking about how excited we were to be starting this journey with a new label family (Republic & Big Loud) and how supported we felt by them, which turned into chatting about situations where you might not feel so supported by someone,” Miranda shared. “In this song’s case, an unappreciative Randy. So, this one’s for anyone with a Randy they need to move on from.”
This album is the first release since signing with a new record label after being with Sony for 18 years.
View this post on Instagram
In a new interview with People, Lambert explains how her husband got involved in writing the song.
“Jon Randall’s my buddy, but his name’s actually Randy, so we always say, ‘Dammit Randy’ to him. And so we started writing this song and Brendan kept popping in while he was watching football. I was like, ‘Are we doing this? In or out? You’re going to have to turn the game off. Pick a side.’”
His joining the writing session wasn’t entirely out of the blue. McLoughlin and Lambert worked on “about four or five little tunes together in their five-year union.” Because of those songs, the former NYPD officer bragged to their friend, songwriter, and producer Jesse Frasure that songwriting wasn’t that hard. The next thing he knew, McLoughlin was in a nearly five-hour writing session, and he quickly realized that songwriting was more difficult than he thought.
“He wrote some of the greatest lines in the song,” Lambert told People. “It was really special actually, because the situation I wrote the song about, Brendan is my husband, so he’s had to hear me bitch about it for so long, that he kind of knew the story better than I did, you know? So he had the same emotion in it that I did and so I’m real proud of him.”
When she was ready to tell him that she had actually recorded a song he helped write, she sat him down and told him she wanted to play him something.
“The whole band knew he’d written it, so we’re all just staring at him, and we’re like, ‘Push play,’” she said. “He won’t say it, but he got a little misty-eyed. He was like, ‘You cut my song?’ It was awesome. And it’s one of my favorites on the record.”
Watch her perform “Dammit Randy” below.