[BonoVox]

In Step With...Miranda Lambert
By James Brady
Published: May 11, 2008
Next Sunday night on the CBS broadcast of the Academy of Country Music Awards from Las Vegas, the sassy, rebellious and dynamic 24-year-old singer/songwriter Miranda Lambert is up for awards in three major categories. Proudly watching in the audience will be her parents—a couple of former private eyes—and her 72-year-old grandma.

“She’s like me—she’s a crazy grandma on a walker. But she still drives everywhere,” Miranda told me from Corpus Christi, her latest tour stop. Celebrated for her most recent album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Miranda’s the only entertainer I’ve met who was given her first guitar and her first gun (only a BB gun, but still) when she was 8. She has taken a concealed-weapons course and is licensed to carry. “I’m a single girl living by myself and traveling a lot,” she said. “I grew up around guns and go out and fire on the range on my dad’s property. But I’m also girly and like to get flowers from my boyfriend.”

After Corpus Christi, she would be off to Lone Prairie for the horse race and a show that night. These days, Miranda tours with “two buses, two trailers, a band of six, four crew guys, and a merchandise girl,” she said. “I do my own wardrobe and makeup.” It was all pretty different a few years back. “My mom and I drove our car on a radio station tour all over Texas when I was 17 and kept getting doors slammed in our faces.”

Unlike some, Miranda writes or co-writes most of her songs. For those who have criticized her work as “down,” she snapped back, “I don’t write about angels, Jesus, happy days, kids. I grew up on drinkin’, cheatin’ and love gone bad.” Does she resent being labeled a renegade and a rebel? “No. I’m a country girl and say whatever’s on my mind,” she said. Then she conceded, “But I’m 24, and I’ve got a lot to learn.”