Twenty Greatest Albums of the CU Era: Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Miranda Lambert

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

2007

What Miranda Lambert accomplished with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was exactly what The Chicks had done with Fly a generation prior. She took the elements that worked brilliantly about her debut album and leaned into them with a sense of purpose and vision. By doing so, she translated what had been a promising debut into a fully-realized artistic persona of depth, intelligence, and nuance.

Because the country industry rarely allows women to be more than one particular thing, let alone a multifaceted human with interior thoughts that might differ from a man’s expectations, much of the early discourse around Lambert missed the sophistication and savvy of what she was doing. Reviews compared her to Gretchen Wilson, whose star had quite rightfully already lost its luster by the time Lambert came around, and focused solely on her propensities for gunplay and revenge and for the more rock-leaning elements of her sound.

And while those are all important elements of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Lambert used the album to subvert the stereotype of its title by creating a persona driven by complex, conflicting, and deeply-felt emotional beats. Sure, she’ll wait on her front porch with a shotgun for her abusive partner to make bail, but she’s also going to consider whether or not Jesus would understand and maybe even empathize with what’s in her heart. She’s not necessarily proud of the fact that she’s skulking around the parking lot while her sleaze of a boyfriend is hitting on every woman in a bar. In fact, she’s second-guessing herself the next day, wondering if she should have acted more like the other women to whom he’s been drawn.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is an album on which hard living and recreational arson come with long-lasting emotional consequences, and some of Lambert’s finest moments are those on which she reckons with the latter. She does so with both humor (I’ll die on the hill that “Guilty In Here” should’ve been a single instead of the title track) and regret (“Love Letters,” which Patty Loveless would’ve made a #1 a decade prior), and no artist of her generation navigated this with this caliber of songwriting or confidence in their footing.

That she knew exactly what she was doing is laid plain by her choice of closing song. “Easy From Now On” is a brilliant composition by Susanna Clark and Carlene Carter, in which the narrator attempts to convince herself that what she’s learned will somehow make things more manageable in the future. It’s the perfect way to conclude the song cycle of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as Lambert wistfully sings, “It’s gonna be easy to fill / The heart of a thirsty woman,” only to bite down on the follow-up, “And harder to kill / The ghost of a no-good man.”

In the context of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Lambert isn’t tipping her hand as to whether that’s a figurative or a literal ghost. She’s remained an absolutely brilliant artist for the better part of the last twenty years, but Crazy Ex-Girlfriend remains the highwater mark for what a mainstream country record can still do in the modern era.

Additional Listening:

A true “albums artist,” Lambert could’ve easily been represented on this list by more than a half-dozen alternate picks. Among the best of her best:

• Revolution, a step down only in the sense that it lacks the same thematic heft and focus of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
• Platinum, which subverts the common trope of a “divorce album” by being what is obviously a “pre-divorce album.” Don’t judge this one by the baffling singles choices.
• The indie-cred establishing The Weight of These Wings, though her independent bona fides had been apparent since her Nashville Stars days.
• And her Pistol Annies work counts, too: Interstate Gospel is an all-timer, but Annie Up is one that’s grown a lot in my estimation of late thanks to the encouragement of our pal Natalie Weiner of Don’t Rock the Inbox.

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