When I previewed country singer Miranda Lambert’s Thursday night concert at Snowden Grove Amphitheatre in this week’s Flyer, I wrote about how she’d forced her way into the top ranks of mainstream country on her terms — as a singer-songwriter with roots in rock, folk, and the fiercely independent Texas songwriter tradition.
But on the day that issue hit the streets, Lambert’s embrace by the country mainstream became complete. Lambert landed nine nominations for this year’s Country Music Association Awards, the most ever for a female artist.
The nominations were announced Wednesday morning, with Lambert in New York on Good Morning America. The next night she was in Southaven, Mississippi, for her first concert since the announcement.
“I’ve got a lot of things to celebrate tonight. Some things that are definitely a drinking matter,” Lambert told what appeared to be a near-capacity crowd.
But if Lambert was in the mood to celebrate her new stature, she wasn’t in the mood to compromise what got her there. After a mix of piped-in warm-up music that culminated, improbably, with Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio,” Lambert bounded onto the stage to the sound of Steve Earle’s “The Revolution Starts Now” and announced, “Y’all ready for some rock and roll?” With that, she and her five-piece, all-Texas-bred band launched into her firecracker breakthrough single, “Kerosene,” which borrows from a different Earle song (“I Feel Alright”) while conflating break-up saga and class-rage anthem. “Forget your high society/I’m soaking it in kerosene,” Lambert sang. “Light ’em up and watch them burn/Teach them what they need to learn.”
