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New York — Dig out your roller blades. Pair them with a cowboy hat. Miranda Lambert has officially entered her disco chapter.
“Crisco,” the country star’s 11th studio album, is a collection of boogie-forward tracks, inspired by sweeping strings and what sounds like a wink from the dance floor. It’s out on Friday.
“I’ve spent a lot of my career doing fiery songs and heartbroken songs and this album just brings it to a whole new level, and I think that’s exactly where I am right now in my life as well,” Miranda says.
The title track is almost a mission statement: “Baby, we’ve been cooking with Crisco/Ain’t we mixing country and disco/Stir it around, give it a spin/And it’s a rhinestone world we live in.”
“I’ve never explored that before. I’m really a Merle Haggard girl, you know what I mean? I love three strings and the truth,” Lambert said. “I just felt like I had, maybe at this point, earned the creative freedom to try something fun and try something different.”
The album caps off a special few months that include seven nominations for the Country Music Association Awards, a disco-ball-filled Academy of Country Music Awards ceremony that got attendees high and boogying, and making history as a co-writer of the crossover-smash “Choosin’ Texas.”
That tune sung by Ella Langley has gone six times platinum, crowned Billboard’s official Song of the Summer 2026 and helped her become the only woman to simultaneously hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts. It was just named the longest running No. 1 hit in the US
“We never would have thought that just sitting there, on a back porch with a beer or a guitar, writing a country song, it would take over like it has,” Lambert says.
“I’m so happy that ‘Choosin’ Texas’ is a country song and that the world loves it. That makes me happy. I’ve dedicated my entire adult life to country music so that it alone brings me so much joy.”
Lambert and Langley wrote “Choosin’ Texas” with Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor. It’s a song that explores what it feels like when someone falls in love with you and Lambert can only guess why America has fallen so much in love with him.
“It feels something new, but also something you’ve heard before. When you hear it, you’re like, ‘I want to sing along to this, even though this is the first time you’ve heard it.’ Do you know what I mean?”
Lambert co-produced Langley’s album “Dandelion,” her first time with another artist, which she says she enjoyed. Langley returns the favor by appearing on “Crisco’s” opening track “Snakeskin Boots.”
“I think the reason we’re drawn to each other is because I see a lot of my own childhood in her,” Lambert says of Langley. “She’s definitely a gun. She’s on fire. She knows exactly what she wants. She’s a true artist and songwriter and she’s an inspiring person to be around.”
Lambert also has good news about another fellow country artist, squashing any beef she had with Kacey Musgraves. The two collaborated on “Horses and Divorces” – “Maybe we’re more alike than we think,” they sing – on Musgraves’ new album “Middle of Nowhere”.
Miranda points to the “subtle seduction of this business” for encouraging the ebb and flow of relationships and the stress of “early stages of your career, trying to put your feet in the ground, put your waist in the ground, and say, ‘This is my place.'”.
“Sometimes it gets difficult when you’re navigating that with other female artists and it was really nice to come together and talk about it and it’s, as we say, a whisper under the bridge now.”
“Crisco” came to life after she and Chris Stapleton wrote and recorded the beautiful “A Song To Sing” version of “Islands in the Stream,” which earned two Grammy Award nominations.
“We wrote this song a few years ago and it opened my mind to exploring different sounds. I think it set us on the path to doing more research and made me really curious about parts of country music that I hadn’t explored yet, which ultimately inspired the whole album,” she says.
The video shows Lambert and Stapleton in matching red outfits at a roller rink. If you look carefully, you’ll see that a pair of Dolly Parton’s hoop earrings were borrowed by the late superstar and are on Kenny Rogers’ necklace.
“I feel like I have to thank her a little bit for this record because that song, that video, that whole day, having a little piece of her around me all day, definitely inspired me for this whole project.”
Grammy Award-winning songwriter Natalie Hemby, who has cut around 40 songs with Lambert over 20 years, collaborates, co-writes and performs on five tracks this time, including “Snakeskin Boots”.
“Every record has just been completely different from the next one, but I’d say this was the most fun I’ve had, writing for her project,” Hemby said. “Her star shines as bright, as big as Texas, if you will.
Miranda says country music is in a good place right now, reminding her of the 1990s when there was something for everyone and many female artists.
“Finally there is a place for everyone,” she says. “We’re not fighting for just 30 spots on the album. And people find music in different ways now. That’s allowed all kinds of voices to exist in our genre.”
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This story has been updated to correct that Lambert has seven Country Music Association Award nominations, not six.
