Miranda Lambert performed an intimate show on Wednesday, Sept. 19, as the Artist-in-Residence at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. The singer, who dubbed the show “The Ones That Got Away,” played through some of her favorite album cuts, joined by fellow country artists, Ashley Monroe, Natalie Hemby, and even her own father, Rick Lambert.
But the special guest Lambert was perhaps most excited about was Allison Moorer, who the 34-year-old admits is her favorite tunesmith.
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“Mostly every time I am around her I feel a little weird because she’s my all-time hero, No. 1 female singer-songwriter of all time,” Lambert gushed from stage. “I asked her if she’d come sing with me. She wrote a song for me, but today in sound check was the first time I’ve ever sang with her so I had my freak out moment. I think I’m going to be okay now.”
Moorer sang her hit, “A Soft Place to Fall,” before Lambert humorously recalled the first time she met Moorer, disclosing how she appeared more like a starstruck fan than a peer.
“I went up to her and told her everything about how much loved her and then ran away and cried,” Lambert recounted, before Moorer shared the story behind “Oklahoma Sky,” which Lambert included on her 2011 Four the Record album. “She sent me this song because … it’s a long story and we’ve been through since some men since then.”
Moorer picked up the story, which started while she was halfway around the world.
“So, clearly Miranda is a bada—,” Moorer began. “I’m very aware, and not living in a bubble at all about that. I have been a fan from the beginning, from the first time I met you. Your ability to write and sing and be who you are has been a pleasure to watch. In 2008, I was in New Zealand with a dude who liked to fly fish. I was in this fishing cabin for three days and I’m like, ‘What am I going to do in this fishing cabin in this really remote part of New Zealand?’ I know, white girl problems. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll write songs and get some s— going. I’ve been out here touring and got a break so I need to get some songs written.’”
Moorer already had the title, “Oklahoma Sky,” in her mind, and was thinking about Lambert’s then-new romance with her now ex-husband, Oklahoma native Blake Shelton, when she found a sign she was supposed to write the song in an unlikely place.
“I was in this cabin, fishing through some stuff in my bag,” she shared. “I had been in Australia and New Zealand so I wasn’t even using U.S. currency. I looked in the bottom of my bag and I saw a U.S. quarter, just randomly. It was heads up and I saw it and I said, ‘If I turn that quarter over, I bet it’s going to be an Oklahoma quarter.’ And so I grabbed the quarter and I turned it over and sure as s—, it was an Oklahoma quarter. Thank you, cosmos.
“So I knew at that moment that it was meant to be, that I had to write this song,” she continued. “[I knew] that I had to do whatever I had to do to pull this out and to make this title into something. So, I ended up writing the song and the end of the story is, the dudes come and go. The song remains. We still got the song.”
Download “Oklahoma Sky” on iTunes.
Photo Credit: Getty images/Rick Diamond
