Best Albums
The ground of female country proved a hard row to hoe this decade. Gretchen Wilson showed up for the party in 2004, proclaimed herself a redneck woman on her spitfire debut, and then fell into an even-more-reactionary slump on the follow-up. Then the decade closed with the tween, kinda-country gloss of Taylor Swift. In between, once Miranda Lambert had made her first appearance on the cable-TV reality show Nashville Star, who could have guessed she’d only get tougher and sweeter as the aughts wore on? Her 2009 release, Revolution, shows her to be still maturing and refusing to become a caricature, but Crazy Ex-Girlfriend hit a unique bull’s-eye, equidistant between the poles of hell-raiser and sweetheart. “Famous in a Small Town” has the openhearted empathy of someone loathe to swat a fly, but, as the title track proves, that doesn’t mean you can get away with stealing her man. And oh, Lambert wrote (or co-wrote) more than three fourths of this rocking, honky-tonk long-player, too.
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