Lambert Says She and Underwood Deserve 'Ribbon' for Survival

Billboard reports Miranda Lambert says she and Carrie Underwood survived a seven-year stretch when country music signed almost no other women.

Billboard reports that Miranda Lambert, speaking on The New York Times' Popcast, said the early 2010s became a stretch when "there were no females at all" coming out of Nashville besides herself and Carrie Underwood. According to Billboard, Lambert recalled, "Carrie Underwood and I made it through pretty much a solid, at least, seven years of only guy artists coming out of country music," and added, "I feel like we should get a ribbon for surviving that. Like, that was a hard time, honestly." She also said that when she started in the early 2000s she wanted to be known for her songs rather than being "the pretty girl."

The complaint is surprising because it lands at the very moment the balance has flipped: Billboard notes Kacey Musgraves, Megan Moroney and Lainey Wilson are thriving, while Ella Langley — who Billboard says just made chart history — recently topped the Hot 100. Lambert herself is part of that shift, since Billboard points out she cowrote Langley's record-setting anthem "Choosin' Texas." Fox News' OutKick goes further, calling Langley "the most recognizable female face in country music" with "no close second," framing the genre's center of gravity as having visibly moved toward women again in a way it lacked during the era Lambert described.

Fox News reports that Lambert and Langley released a new duet, "Snakeskin Boots," early Friday morning, and that it was already generating buzz within hours. According to Fox News, the song has "the vibe of an old Western gunslinger film about people on run," and both stars worked as co-writers on the track. Fox News quotes fan reactions on YouTube — "Sounds like an outlaw song to me! Love it!" and "The Dynamic Duo!! This is amazing!!" — and describes the pairing of a two-decade legend with the genre's fastest-rising new star as a naturally good time.

Billboard reports that "Choosin' Texas," the country anthem Lambert just happened to cowrite, became the longest-running Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 in chart history after logging its 23rd week in the top spot, and that the track has since added a 24th week to its reign. Billboard also notes Lambert recently teamed with Langley for the song and gifted $255,000 through her MuttNation Foundation in surprise grants to animal welfare groups. The chart milestone gives extra weight to Lambert's survival narrative: the woman her publisher calls kindred is now setting all-time records in a format that once had room for almost no women at all.

One detail Billboard highlights explains how separate the two survivors' careers were: Lambert said she and Underwood only recently saw each other perform, attending one another's Las Vegas residencies. "It was a really cool bonding moment because first of all, her show was incredible, and we had never seen each other [play]," Billboard quotes Lambert saying — and she pinned the gap directly on scarcity: "You know why? There were only two girls for so long. We weren't playing the same shows ever." The two did collaborate on the 2014 Billboard Hot 100 top 40 hit "Somethin' Bad," which Billboard cites, but the residencies mark a first kind of professional meeting.

Meanwhile the genre's women-led era shows no sign of slowing, with Billboard naming Musgraves, Moroney and Wilson among those currently thriving. For readers, the takeaway is that Lambert's "ribbon" comment is both a historical grievance and a marker of how far the pendulum has swung — a male-dominated decade giving way to a chart history set by a woman, co-written by one of the very survivors.