Miranda Lambert's 7th album Wildcard will be out this Friday, so I wanted to look at her career up to this point. I've done relatively few playlists for country artists in this series, so I'm always looking to do more (previously: Brad Paisley, George Jones, Dwight Yoakam, Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, and Eric Church). and Lambert is probably the defining female country star of her time -- more acclaimed than Carrie Underwood and more commercially successful than Kacey Musgraves, she's right in that sweet spot of sales and respect. And even though she's receded a little bit from the mainstream in recent years (ironically, 2014's Platinum was her first album that didn't sell a million copies), a new Lambert album is pretty big news.

Miranda Lambert deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Down
2. Me And Your Cigarettes
3. Tomboy
4. Fine Tune
5. What About Georgia?
6. Getting Ready
7. Priscilla
8. Maintain The Pain
9. Pink Sunglasses
10. Girls
11. I Wanna Die
12. Dry Town
13. Highway Vagabond
14. Look At Miss Ohio
15. Old Sh!t
16. Guilty In Here
17. Dear Diamond
18. Love Song
19. Bad Boy
20. Greyhound Bound For Nowhere
21. Better In The Long Run (with Blake Shelton)
22. That's The Way The World Goes 'Round

Tracks 5, 11 and 20 from Kerosene (2005)
Tracks 1, 6, 12 and 16 from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2007)
Tracks 2, 8, 18 and 22  from Revolution (2009)
Tracks 4, 14, 17 and 21 from Four The Record (2011)
Tracks 7, 10, and 15 and from Platinum (2014)
Tracks 3, 9, 13 and 19 from The Weight Of These Wings (2016)

I have to admit I kind of missed the boat on Miranda Lambert for a long time. I remember CMT playing her first video, "Me And Charlie Talking," around the clock, even though it didn't do much damage on the charts, and playing up that she'd finished 3rd place on the "American Idol" country knockoff "Nashville Star." I didn't like that song, so I kind of dismissed her as a reality TV star that was getting pushed hard by TV networks as a . I didn't really have a clue that she was becoming a major star and a critical favorite until a couple of years later when I saw Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on a ton of year-end lists. And even after that, it took me a while to warm up to her as a singles artists and eventually check out the albums and kind of get what the fuss was about.

There's some great stuff here, I particularly like the dense texture of instruments in the verses on "Getting Ready." And I'm amused that Miranda Lambert released a song called "Old Sh!t" just a few months after Future had a hit with "Sh!t." The cover of John Prine's 1978 song "That's The Way That The World Goes Round" that appeared on Revolution is the most played non-single in Lambert's live repertoire, followed by "Maintain The Pain" from the same album (her shortest and arguably best song), and "Highway Vagabond" from The Weight Of These Wings, which has some cool 7/8 measures in the verses.

The Weight Of These Wings was a double album, a big ambitious 94-minute record she released after her divorce from Blake Shelton, and it's hard to imagine almost any of her contemporaries even attempting a record like that (especially Shelton). That said, it has a weird almost muddy sound to it, not stripped down or simple but just kind of ramshackle, and sometimes it works but it often doesn't. I do enjoy weird playful moments like "Pink Sunglasses" or the false start in the vocal track on "Bad Boy." But I think her best song about Shelton was Platinum's "Priscilla," an ode to Priscilla Presley that empathizes with their shared plight of being "married to a man who's married to attention."

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