In 2001, a 17-year-old Texan country singer named Miranda Lambert self-released her eponymous debut album. It had a small release and today is a rarity, with CD copies going for upwards of $100 on eBay. But it made a splash in the local music scene, and two tracks even charted on the Texas Music Chart. One of these was the opener "Somebody Else," a song of escape whose chorus begins, "I wanna feel my freedom blowing' through my hair/Throw my troubles to the wind and scream out I don't care." She concludes: "I wanna be somebody else for a little while." Two years later, Lambert competed on the talent competition series Nashville Star, and during a segment on her childhood, her mother described her as "very introspective" in contrast to her parents' louder, more extroverted personalities. That early song and segment both speak to why Lambert means so much to me.
After a third-place finish on Nashville Star, Lambert signed with Epic Records, and in 2005 released her first major-label album Kerosene. Kerosene is a significant improvement on the debut, obviously due to the higher budget, professional studio musicians, and experienced producers. But also, Lambert's singing is simply more confident, her songwriting sharper, and her personality fully on display — especially when she goes full revenge-mode on the title track.
Tucked into the final stretch of the album is "Love is Looking For You," where Lambert sings: "So you're lookin' for your skin/That you never did fit in/You can't hide when you're turned inside out/Love is looking for you now."
Many of Lambert's songs are filled with self-doubt, with a longing to feel correct, for your mental and physical states to finally jibe; to finally feel at home. In a way, this is par for the course with singer-songwriters, a vulnerability that more intimate songcraft offers. And yet, I would describe Lambert as a songstress more than an auteurist. She's a phenomenal writer, but she can also pick up any song and make something out of it — handling songs by John Prine and Patty Griffin with the same authority she brings to the tunes she's penned herself.
Lambert's gotten personal plenty of times, especially in 2016 when her recent divorce from Blake Shelton inspired The Weight of These Wings, a double-album that at least appeared to be a confessional work. But there doesn't seem to be any sort of commitment to authenticity throughout her catalog, no indication that the overstressed and undersexed wife snapping and burning her house down in "Housewife's Prayer" and the free spirit breaking hearts and never being tied down in "Airstream Song" are the same person. It's all performance, after all. Why, then, do I relate to so many of Lambert's songs on such a personal level?
I first became a Lambert fan when I was 18. I bought a copy of her 2007 follow-up to Kerosene, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and immediately was enamored with the opening track. "Gunpowder & Lead" is a song about a battered woman loading a shotgun, ready to use it on her recently bailed-out abuser. As far as I knew, I was a teenaged boy who just happened to, for some reason, be drawn towards feminism and riot grrrl, whose best friends were mostly queer and who felt queer but didn't know why. In my eyes, "Gunpowder & Lead" may as well have been a Bikini Kill song. It was punk.
A decade later, with a new name and significantly different hormone levels, I finally got around to reading the groundbreaking trans novel Nevada by Imogen Binnie. Early in the book's second part, the transgender protagonist Maria, months into a directionless road trip and desperate for something to listen to other than the radio, heads into a Walmart looking to buy a copy of ... Crazy Ex-Girlfriend by Miranda Lambert. She's just heard the song "Gunpowder & Lead" on a country station and thinks it's ... "the punkest shit on the radio."
Is this universal? Is it a part of the transfeminine experience to hear "Gunpowder & Lead" and think, "This shit is fucking punk rock and feminist and amazing?" I thought it must be a coincidence, until later on, when I read another trans fiction writer, Casey Plett, sing the praises of Lambert's songs "Ugly Lights" and "I Hope You're the End of My Story." And that did it for me. How does a cisgender, heterosexual country singer keep speaking to trans women on some fundamental level — particularly trans women writers?
I started thinking about it more, looking for other songs in her discography that might clue me in. There was "Tomboy" ("Daddy tried to raise a southern belle/Well, he got a tomboy"), which understands that gender is performance and failing to perform correctly will always get you stares. There's the dysmorphic "Gravity is a Bitch," about the anxiety of getting older and realizing your looks are going to fade — that the beauty standards you've lived by like a religious doctrine will cease to mean anything when things inevitably start sagging. (You know what else is a bitch? Gender dysphoria, baby!) Then I came to "Bathroom Sink," and ... god.
The best song on Lambert's 2014 album Platinum, "Bathroom Sink" simply reads like a trans woman wrote it. It's a song about the horror of having to look in the mirror and see what stares back, about complicated relationships with parents that have left scars on your self-image that may never heal, and about taking your meds and putting on a brave face because faux-composure is the only thing keeping you from completely breaking.
"It's amazing the amount of rejection that I see in my reflection," Lambert sings. "I'm looking forward to the girl I want to be/But regret has got a way of staring me right in the face/So I try not to waste too much time at the bathroom sink."
I'm looking forward to the girl I want to be! If Laura Jane Grace or Ezra Furman performed this song, I wouldn't have batted an eye.
But the thing is, "Bathroom Sink" is not a trans song. It's a song about womanhood, written by Lambert, and it's relatable to me as a trans woman because — pardon the Tumblrism — trans women are women. But also, there are layers to Lambert's portrayal of womanhood that appeal to me as someone who had to dig to discover her own.
Lambert understands that being a woman is not always pretty, that sometimes trying to fit into this oppressive, gendered box makes it hard to even look at yourself, and that these expectations can strain your relationships with the people important to you. Sometimes you just want to be another person — to create a world where it all comes more naturally, where you can just be who you are without all the weight of these wings.
But Lambert also knows that womanhood isn't defined by suffering. Womanhood is beautiful and powerful and it feels amazing when you're able to embrace it. It's fun to be feminine, and it's also fun to subvert femininity because gender is made up — but it also feels like the only thing that's real sometimes. There's a depth to the depiction of gender in Lambert's songs. This may come from my earlier claim that she's a songstress more than anything, so light, silly songs like "Pink Sunglasses" get mixed in with harrowing ones like "Vice." But even if Lambert has never intended this, and I wouldn't bet money on that, it's profound nonetheless.
In 2022, I was working at a record store. I'd been pondering what Lambert meant to me for a while, and when I got to choose the music one day, I decided to put on her new record Palomino. Nothing had changed. She was still Miranda, great as she'd ever been. She collaborated with The B-52's, covered a solo Mick Jagger song, and made me wonder if the sapphic implication was intended when she followed the line "Met an old hippie named Katie with a K" with "Went skinny dipping in Havasu Lake."
Near the end of the album came "If I Was a Cowboy," which plays around with gender with reckless abandon. Lambert wishes to be a cowboy rather than a cowgirl, but also a queen, mixing gendered terms in a chaotic way that would make Stephin Merritt proud. Then comes the bridge, which declares ...
"So mamas if your daughters grow up to be cowboys ... so what?"
Indeed. Miranda Lambert said trans rights.
