Why Miranda Lambert Was Thrilled She Didn’t Win ‘Nashville Star,’ the Competition Show That Launched Her Career
Miranda Lambert’s first big break took place in 2003 when she was 19. She competed on a show called Nashville Star, and she finished in third place. Even though she didn’t win the competition, being on the show got her noticed by people in the music industry. And eventually, she got signed as a result. But even before she knew her fate in Nashville, Lambert was thankful she didn’t place first on the show. Here’s why.
Winners of ‘Nashville Star’ had to sing songs written by other people
Before Lambert went on Nashville Star, she’d already begun to sow the seeds of her career.
“I was writing songs and playing… I was playing bars in Texas for two and a half years before I even auditioned for Nashville Star,” she said on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? On HBO and CNN. ”So I had made a little independent record. I was writing songs. I was kind of starting to make a little name for myself in my home state which has its own music scene to begin with.”
So, by the time the “Actin’ Up” singer auditioned for the show, she already had plenty of original songs under her belt. And she wanted to share them.
While competing on the show, Nashville Star participants were welcome to sing their own songs. But the winners had to sing songs by other people. For this reason, Lambert never wanted to win.
“So I just felt like… the reason I even auditioned for National Star in the first place is because they allowed you to do originals and that was important to me. That’s why I never tried out for Idol or anything because I wanted to sing my own songs and I wrote that song “Greyhound Bound for Nowhere” with my dad when I was 17. They said, you know, if you make it past certain weeks in the show, you get to do your own songs. And that was so important to me. Because this was the first time I was like letting the world see who I was as an artist and I knew that it was really important to establish myself as a songwriter.”
A lot of people tried to change Miranda Lambert early in her career
One thing about Miranda Lambert is that she knows who she is. And she’s known it since she was young. Early in her career, a lot of people in the music industry tried to change her in an effort to make her more marketable. But she’s always stayed true to herself.
“When you first try to, you know, get into this entertainment industry there’s people that will try to change you. They’ll see a blonde country singer with blue eyes and there was risk of people trying to dress me in a way that I didn’t want to dress or change my sound, and I just wasn’t gonna go for that even really young,” she said.
For the Palomino singer, it’s always been about the music. Particularly, the stories she wants to tell through her own writing.
“I just kind of knew it’s not about that,” she said. “It’s about what I have to say because I knew I had some really great messages. I wanted to share with the world and I wanted that to be through song and not through, you know, a crop top or, I don’t know, something that didn’t feel real to me. So it’s really about sticking to my guns, especially in my early years in the business of just really wanting it to be about the music. But I’m still that way.”
