“Kerosene”
Miranda Lambert
Written by Miranda Lambert and Steve Earle
2005
Miranda Lambert had an alt-country sensibility right from the jump. On one of her first performances on Nashville Star, Charlie Robison praised the then-20 year-old’s songwriting with a comparison to no less than Lucinda Williams. And her breakthrough single– the third single released from her major label debut– bore such deeply-ingrained similarities to the melody and structure of a Steve Earle track that she ended up giving Earle a co-writing credit.
What was clear about Lambert and what immediately set her apart from every one of her contemporaries at radio at the time was her agency over her own persona. She hadn’t set out to plagiarize Earle’s “I Feel Alright” the way some detractors claimed: She could only write songs the way that she wrote them, and she’s spent her career putting deep cuts by artists like Gillian Welch, Fred Eaglesmith, Shake Russell, and Allison Moorer on major label country records. She knows exactly what she’s doing and always has.
On “Kerosene,” it’s Lambert alone who’s responsible for the spectacular, savvy use of the rhyme scheme to make a point. While most of the verses consist of simply rhymed couplets (“I’m waitin’ on the sun to set / Cause yesterday ain’t over yet” and the like), she throws in an occasional slant rhyme to bolster lines that subvert the genre’s strictures for how women are supposed to behave. She guesses she’ll smoke some cigarettes, and she’ll douse your high society with the cheap fuel poor people use to heat their houses.
Then she’ll make her intentions clear by dropping the rhyme scheme altogether: “Now I don’t hate the one who left / You can’t hate someone who’s dead.”
Who’s going to dare to argue her logic in that moment?
“Kerosene” kicked off two decades of homicides in the country mainstream, and, unlike The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” Lambert and her other sisters-in-arms were usually singing in the first person. Again, with Lambert, the discussion always hinges on her agency. She titled her third album Revolution, but her revolutionary work truly began here.
That she did all of this on the hardest-rocking hit since Dwight Yoakam’s “Fast As You” and with an all-time great wordplay (“I’m givin’ up on love / Cause love’s given up on me”) of a hook? She came to burn down some shit that needed to be burned down. And if she never did go fully scorched-earth on Music Row, that others have picked up her gas can in the years since gives hope that the rot at the roots is tinder for other fires.
Additional Listening:
Steve Earle’s “I Feel Alright,” for when inspiration strikes
Three other Lambert singles, all of which were in conversation for this retrospective and highlight the breadth of her talent:
- “Gunpowder and Lead,” her first top 10 hit
- “The House That Built Me,” her first #1 and her best single she didn’t have a hand in writing
- “Vice,” her last great single
Girls hit your hallelujah: Pistol Annies, “Interstate Gospel”
Country Universe: A 20th Anniversary Retrospective
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