Miranda Lambert rips country’s ‘pretty girl’ mold: ‘I’m a gun-totin redneck’

Miranda Lambert says she and Carrie Underwood spent years as rare women in a country scene built around male headliners, and that the two of them should get credit for getting through it.

On a Popcast episode, Lambert looked back at the early 2000s, when she said the expectation for women was simple. “It’s like, dress sexy, be sexy, be a pretty girl,” she said. “And I was like, ‘I’m a gun-totin’ redneck,’ do you know what I mean? And I wanted to make sure that it didn’t get lost in translation.”

She said that mold did not match the records she wanted to make. “The House That Built Me” singer framed the period as a fight to keep her own image from being sanded down into the industry’s version of a female star.

The squeeze got tighter later, she said. “And then, in like 2010 era, it was like, there were no females at all. Carrie Underwood and I made it through pretty much a solid at least 7 years of only guy artists coming out of country music.”

Lambert called that stretch unbalanced. “It’s like, ‘Wow this is really off kilter a little bit,’ you know what I mean,” she said. She and Underwood, she added, were not sharing bills. “You know why? There were only two girls for so long. We weren’t playing the same shows ever.”

She said the business looks different now, and she tied that to how people hear music. “And now, I feel like, it is really balanced. I really do, and I think a lot of that has to do with the way music is consumed and there’s finally room for every damn body.”

The line she wanted remembered was about endurance. “I feel like we should get a ribbon for surviving that. Like, that was a hard time, honestly.”

Lambert said she only recently made it to one of Underwood’s shows, and that Underwood came to one of hers. “Carrie and I went to each other’s residencies in Vegas, and it was a really cool bonding moment because, first of all her show is incredible, and we had never seen each other,” she said.

She closed on the wider field. “It’s gotten so much better, and I’m so thankful that, like, that there’s, you know, room for a crowd now. Everybody has something different. I feel like all the voices can be heard, all the messages can be heard. You don’t have to love them all, but at least there’s a way to hear them.”