Miranda Lambert Opens Up About Divorce, Songwriting and the Danger of Social Media

Miranda Lambert bared her soul on her 2016 The Weight of These Wings double album. The record, which Lambert insists was not a divorce record, nonetheless captured everything she had experienced, including her highly-publicized divorce from Blake Shelton, her regular spot as a tabloid headliner, and her blossoming romance with her now-ex-boyfriend, Anderson East.

“My intention was to use it as therapy, to figure this sh–– out,” Lambert tells Hits Daily Double. “I was going through a divorce very publicly, and thank the Lord I am a writer. That meant I could find some way to deal with it, that people could say, ‘I get it — I’ve been there too.’ And ‘It’s why I relate to you, because I went through the same thing.’ It made me feel so alone, as much as it does anybody else. There’s fun stuff on there too. I feel like I’ve captured the seven stages of grief, but it took me 24 songs to get there.”

While all those experiences, and more, shaped the two dozen songs that appeared on The Weight of These Wings, one thing that didn’t shape the album was social media, because Lambert chose to step away from it all.

“I took three months off all socials in 2015,” says Lambert. “I loved it. I realized I wasn’t picking up my phone looking at Twitter and Instagram. I wasn’t learning anything, wasn’t learning any what or why. I read Willie Nelson’s It’s a Long Story, and poetry. I wrote 75 songs in six months because I wasn’t using my mind staring at mindless sh––.”

The Texas native has since returned to posting updates of her life, but admits it’s a balancing act she is still trying to navigate.

“I took a week off [social media] a little while ago, and it felt so good,” Lambert says. “But you have to use it for work. I don’t want all my posts to be about promoting something. I do want to let people in on my regular life too; I’m just not very good at it. It makes me nervous, ’cause I’m private. I want to have some mystery, and I want people I’m fans of to have mystery too.

“But I just read and wrote so much more when I wasn’t staring,” she continues. “Sitting in a bar by myself, listening to conversations around me, that’s where you can find interesting things, not staring at Instagram. Somebody said to me once, ‘Stop comparing your behind-the-scenes to everybody else’s highlights. It’s not fair.’ It’s pretty simple, but it resonated with me.”

Lambert co-wrote eight of the songs on the first disc, The Nerve, and all of the songs on the second disc, The Heart, on The Weight of These Wings, a feat she likely couldn’t have accomplished without experiencing all of the pain and anguish she did with the end of her marriage.

“I feel like I’m finally coming into my own as a writer, to really be where I want to be with it,” Lambert concedes. “I think it comes with life and time. Having the first 12 years of my career being really balls-to-the-wall, work, work, work, get to the goal, get to the next goal. You reach a place where you have to slow down; you have to breathe and look.”

Citing cerebral writers like John Prine and Guy Clark as her influences, the 34-year-old admits her shift to thinking of herself as a songwriter, and not just an artist who writes songs, has had a profound effect on her personality, and not necessarily a positive one.

“It also makes me a little weirder,” Lambert acknowledges. “I can feel myself getting a little reclusive or a little spacey. It comes to me in waves. You feel it start to come, this bubbling up but it’s not here yet. It wants to come out, but you don’t even know what it is.

“All that being said, I still love great songwriters,” she adds. “Finding songs where you go, ‘Damn it, I wish I wrote that,’ that’s the greatest feeling in the world. I cut a lot of outside songs, and I have a new appreciation for that too. Take ‘Priscilla’ [from Platinum]. Man, I never would’ve thought of that, but I need that in my life.”

Photo Credit: Getty images/Ethan Miller