Miranda Lambert Releases Mini-Documentary on Making of 'Wildcard'

Miranda Lambert's album Wildcard was released nearly one year ago in November 2019, and last week, the country star gave fans a look at the making of the project with a 13-minute mini-documentary released on YouTube. "Oddly enough, on my seventh solo album, I feel like I approached it more like my very first album. I had taken the first long stretch I've ever had off in my entire career," Lambert muses as the video begins. "Since I was 17, I've never taken more than three months off the road."

"But finally you realize how much you need to take a breath," she continued. "It does give room for so much more creativity, if you're in the studio when you're not coming in off the road just exhausted." The Texas native shared that around half of Wildcard was written before she had time off and the other half during her break, which she noted gives the album a "journey of kind of the tail end of a phase of life going into a whole new phase of life."

The mini-doc includes interviews with several of Lambert's writing collaborators including Natalie Hemby, Luke Dick, Ashley Monroe and The Love Junkies (Lori McKenna, Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey) as well as the album's producer, Jay Joyce.

During her break from the road, Lambert married husband Brendan McLoughlin and began spending time in New York City, which she credited as major inspiration for Wildcard. "Whether I wanted it to or not, the art of the city and the music in the city sort of leaked into my creative process," she said. Joyce shared that Lambert told him she wanted to get back to "having fun" with the project.

"Of all the albums I've made, I feel like it's the one I've overthought the least," she said. "I just had confidence in the process. I had confidence in [Joyce], I had confidence in the band, I had confidence in the songs, I was like, 'I'm not gonna go home and stress myself out to death over this' because, I don't know, it just felt like it was gonna work."

Later in the clip, she noted that all of the songs on Wildcard are true to her brand of honesty and "owning it." "I've always been that way in my music, I've never tried to hide anything," she said. "Sometimes I've been too honest, uncomfortably honest, but I just believe in it because that's my job. To just say 'Here's my story, hope y'all have one similar.'"

Wildcard's first single, "It All Comes Out in the Wash," cracked the Top 15 on the country charts, and its second, "Bluebird," topped the charts this summer and gave Lambert her first solo No. 1 song in six years. The third single, "Settling Down," recently arrived at radio.