NEED TO KNOW
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Miranda Lambert opened up about her 2015 divorce from Blake Shelton in an Oct. 27 podcast appearance
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She said she moved back to Nashville and “used the misery” to reconnect with songwriting after the split
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Lambert “wrote 75 songs” during that time, which she also described as “magical” for her creatively
Miranda Lambert says her divorce from Blake Shelton led to lots of “misery” — and lots of songs.
Over a decade after the country musicians divorced in 2015, Lambert, 42, opened up about that period of her life, which she says was “not a fun time” — and also spawned “75 songs” — in the Tuesday, Oct. 27 episode of songwriter Ross Golan’s podcast And The Writer Is…
After she and Shelton, 50, called it quits, Lambert left behind small-town life — the exes resided in Shelton’s hometown of Tishomingo, Okla. for much of their time together — and went on to pour her “misery” into her sixth studio album, The Weight of These Wings, she told host Golan.
“I got divorced and that sucks for anyone, especially in the public eye, especially on tour, especially in the middle of a very public career — two of us — you know what I mean? It just was a really not fun time,” Lambert said on And The Writer Is… “And I, in the meantime, had moved back to Nashville full-time, and so I dove headfirst into songwriting. I had missed it.”
Working on the album post-divorce, Lambert explained, was “the opposite of” her previous album, Platinum, which saw her “come to town and write specifically for” the record, and then leave again.
“And when I moved back [to Nashville] in 2015, I gathered up all of my friends and relationships from, you know, all of the previous years and just used it, used the misery,” the country star said.
“I used the staying out too late at honky-tonks,” she continued. “I used what I was living and my friends went on that journey with me — friends being songwriters — and I think I wrote 75 songs in like, a year. I mean, in like, the first four months I moved back.”
Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert at the Grammys in Los Angeles in January 2014.
Credit: Christopher Polk/Getty Images
It was a challenging period in Lambert’s life, she explained, but also a fruitful one, at least creatively speaking.
“And it was kind of magical,” she explained on the podcast, “because I really started growing my songwriting then. It wasn’t writing towards a specific record or a sound or a feisty or whatever. It was, like, raw emotion.”
“And I think I really grew as a vocalist and a songwriter,” she continued, “because I spent so much of my downtime with a guitar in my hand for the first time, you know?… And it was worth it. It was worth laying it out there.”
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Lambert and Shelton were together for 10 years and married for four before announcing their split in 2015. At the time, they said in a joint statement, “This is not the future we envisioned. And it is with heavy hearts that we move forward separately.”
The “Gunpowder & Lead” singer later found love again with husband Brendan McLoughlin, whom she met outside of Good Morning America in 2018 and married in 2019.
Shelton, meanwhile, began dating then-Voice costar Gwen Stefani in late 2015, and they married in 2021.
Read the original article on People
