Number One With a Bullet: Podcast 
Her Way 
Number One With a Bullet
Miranda Lambert sings songs about shooting an abusive husband, burning down a lover’s house, and beating up an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. Faith Hill she ain’t, and she’s not exactly radio-friendly either. But the East Texas girl has topped the charts twice—and she might even save country music.
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She became a fixture on the Texas circuit, playing places like Gruene Hall; Love & War in Texas, in Plano; and the Tap Room, in San Marcos. In 2003, at nineteen, she appeared on the USA Network’s American Idol knockoff Nashville Star, parlaying her third-place finish into a contract with Sony BMG. She was surprised when label execs promised to let her put her own songs on her debut, but not so much that she felt compelled to match their concession with any of her own. At the preproduction song-pitching session, where she was expected to find radio-friendly songs to fill out her record, she held her ground and was practically polite about it. “I listened to twenty songs, and the label people said, ‘Okay, you need to say yes to at least one song, because you’re starting to hurt people’s feelings.’ But I would have hated to put some polished pop cover song on my record. I can’t sell a song if I don’t believe it. I said, ‘This just isn’t as good as “Kerosene.”’ I think I played the game. Luckily, I won.”
Four years and two number one albums later, Miranda is right where she wants to be, except for the pesky matter of radio play, a vexing problem with no ready answer. Some would suggest the hang-up is her unapologetic renegade image. Others say it’s the youth of her fan base, that country radio targets women over 35 but that a typical Miranda fan is 10 to 15 years younger than that. Jimmy Rector, a vice president of radio promotion at her label, wouldn’t get into any of that. He just said that if radio had played Miranda more often, if the song “Kerosene” had gone top five instead of stalling at fifteen, the album Kerosene could have sold one or two million more copies.
“I don’t get played a lot on country radio, and I don’t understand why,” Miranda said. “All I know is that I listen to radio, and if I like something, I buy it. And every other person is going to do that. If they don’t hear it, how can they buy it?”
She sounds more frustrated than hurt when she talks about it. “I grew up listening to country radio. I started this career because I heard about that talent contest in Longview on country radio. I feel like I fit into this business, I fit into this format. And I would really love all the radio stations to embrace me. So I will do your free shows, I will do your meet and greets, and, you know, we’ll get along fine.”
In the meantime she’ll continue on the path of artists she admires who overcame the same obstacle, performers like Waylon Jennings and the Dixie Chicks, who played every hall that would book them while they waited for radio to catch up. “The club we’re playing tonight holds nearly four thousand people,” she said. “It’s a warehouse with a bar in it, and that’s just fun. When the fans are screaming and fighting and they’re, you know, drunk? It’s like, yes! This is why I got into this.”
Country fans were everywhere at the MGM Grand during the ACM weekend, waiting for any chance to touch the stars. They started assembling each morning in front of elevator banks and spread out through the day to wait outside big-spender poker rooms, valet stands, restaurants and bars, and random stretches of floor cordoned off by velvet ropes. They were on missions specific and general, looking for stars big and small. A paralegal from Champaign, Illinois—“The home of Alison Krauss, I always point out,” he said proudly—carried a manila folder with fifty CD booklets in it, most of which he had gotten autographed on this trip. A woman behind him shouted at anyone walking by in boots and a hat. “You look like Brad Paisley! Come over here!” she screamed, waving a digital camera and a Sharpie over her head.
A group was already calling Miranda’s name when she arrived at 9:45 on Monday morning to do an hour-long, nationwide tour of country radio stations in a small banquet hall just outside the arena. There, in a crowded room set up like a sweatshop for phone solicitors, more than a hundred radio deejays from around the country were broadcasting live and taping spots for their shows. Again in boots and jeans but this time with a fitted red Western shirt with roses stitched at the waist and the yokes, a clutch of beads and necklaces around her neck, and a big gold-and-red ring on the hand holding a Starbucks to-go cup—“It’s my ladybug ring, which I bought for five dollars at some cheapie store,” she said with a smile—Miranda signed a couple guitars to be auctioned for charity and then went to work on radio. She was given to a handler who led her from table to table and kept her on a strict schedule of three minutes at each interview, two minutes of witty banter and one minute of station IDs: “Happy holidays, St. Louis, from Miranda Lambert and WIL country radio.” At each stop deejays started by telling Miranda how great “Famous in a Small Town” was and then asked some variant of “How thrilling is it to be nominated again for Top New Female Vocalist?” Then they proceeded to get witty.
“What’s the last thing you killed?”
“A deer,” she smiled.
“What’s the weirdest thing that was ever thrown at you onstage?”
“Boxers,” she smiled.
“Have you ever been on a hunting or fishing date?”
“Of course,” she smiled.
Miranda stayed sweet and chipper, which couldn’t have been easy. She knew all too well which deejays were playing her songs and which weren’t. But if she’d been raised to stand up for herself, she’d also learned manners, and she showed no resentment, not even in her eyes.
Thirty minutes after the radio work was completed, Miranda unwound while waiting to rehearse for a performance that night at the ACM’s new artists showcase. She focused on the tiny, apocalyptic problems of a 23-year-old woman: her clothes and her boyfriend. Reba McEntire had recently invited Miranda and Blake to stay at her home in Cabo San Lucas. “But Blake doesn’t have a passport,” Miranda said in disbelief. And then: “I tried on some skinny jeans last week, but short girls with big butts cannot wear those.”
Her cell phone rang, its ringtone playing “Red Bandana,” by Merle Haggard. It was Miranda’s mom, calling from her hotel room, where Miranda’s dad had gotten food poisoning from the free burritos in the VIP area. Miranda fished through her purse for the phone, pulling out first a couple lip gloss pens, then a piece of chewed-up chewing gum, three more lip glosses, a camouflage pocketbook, and finally the phone. She looked at it while Haggard sang on.
“Sometimes I don’t even answer it because I’m just listening to the song.”
If you visit Lindale on an afternoon when Rick and Beverly Lambert aren’t on the road with their daughter, you’re apt to find them at a picnic table in front of the Miranda Lambert General Store, drinking beer, listening to Miranda records, and talking about the long haul to country stardom with a group of Bev’s girlfriends known as the Ya-Ya’s. Bev calls the store, stocked with CDs, posters, and stacks of twenty different Miranda T-shirts, Lindale’s number one tourist attraction. In a town where the previous favorite daughter was a girl who carried the Olympic torch on its way to the 2002 Games, the claim is believable, if not entirely verifiable.
Though the parents, of course, look nothing alike, somehow the daughter looks exactly like both of them, possessing her dad’s defiant chin and her mom’s flirting eyes. She also inherited their unconditional love of old country music and the self-reliant, no-nonsense worldview that steers her career and informs her songs. Her parents are retired private investigators, good enough at proving up infidelity, and sure enough of their moral assessments, that they were hired by Paula Jones’s litigation team to head the investigation of Bill Clinton in the nineties. But before they grabbed that brass ring, they endured a bad financial stretch in which country music was about the only bare thread they had.
When Rick and Bev met, in 1975, he was a 24-year-old don’t-jack-with-me Dallas narcotics cop and an aspiring country singer, and his band was playing a party at the apartment complex where Beverly, then 15, lived with her mother. “I fell in love looking at him with that guitar in his hand,” said Bev, sitting next to a cooler full of Michelob Ultras one evening at the store in mid-July. “And our love of music has always been the link. I told my mom, ‘I met the man I’m going to marry today.’” They wed five years later and became full partners in everything they’ve done since, from raising Miranda and younger brother Luke to staking out cheating spouses to managing Miranda’s career when she left high school.
In 1990, when Miranda was six and Luke was two, a bad side-business venture ate up the family’s cash, and a couple slow investigating months kept new money from coming in. (As Miranda recently told Blender magazine, “It’s not like you can ask people, ‘Is your husband cheating on you? Because I need work.’”) Constitutionally incapable of declaring bankruptcy, Rick and Bev ended up losing everything they had: two houses, two cars, and two businesses. They moved from Dallas to Lindale to live with Bev’s brother.
“When we got to Lindale, we had to start a whole new life,” said Rick. “We wanted to farm, and Bev and I are like SpongeBob SquarePants when it comes to something we want to know about. We read every book and talked to every damn body that knew anything about it or looked like they might. I started hanging out at the feed store talking to old farmers. I remember asking one old guy how to keep goats in your yard . . .”
“And what did he say, Dad?” Bev asked. “He said, ‘If your fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold a goat.’”
“That’s right,” said Rick. “So we started growing onions, cabbage, and broccoli, raising rabbits, chickens, ducks, pigs, goats, everything. The kids saw life from the beginning, from the breeding through the birth to the death. Bev would stir-fry rabbits for dinner, and I sold the rest for five dollars apiece, skin-on for petting or skin-off for eating. And if I saw a deer down in the pasture, I’d shoot it. I didn’t give a damn if it was in season or not.”
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