Miranda Lambert has given a rare, plain account of her divorce from Blake Shelton, and of the music that followed it. Speaking on songwriter Ross Golan’s And The Writer Is… podcast in an episode released on 27 October 2026, she said the split was hard to live through in public, and that going back to Nashville full time turned that hard period into a burst of songwriting.
“I got divorced, and that sucks for anyone, especially in the public eye,” Lambert said on the podcast, according to the Parade report on Lambert’s podcast appearance. “Especially on tour, especially in the middle of a very public career.”
It is a short quote, but it explains a lot about the album that came next. Lambert did not frame the period as a comeback story. She framed it as work: friends, guitars, late nights, and songs written from what she was actually living through.
What Lambert said about the divorce
Lambert and Shelton were married from 2011 to 2015, after about ten years together. Both were already well known in country music, and both had busy touring careers, so the end of the marriage played out while both remained in the public eye.
On the podcast, Lambert said the divorce was “a really not fun time.” She did not go into detail about the reasons for the split, and she did not blame anyone. Her point was simpler: a divorce is painful for anyone, and doing it while on tour, with two public careers involved, made it harder.
That restraint matters. A lot of coverage of celebrity splits fills gaps with guesswork. Here, the new information comes from Lambert herself, in her own words, and it is mainly about what she did next.
75 songs, written fast
After the split, Lambert moved back to Nashville full time. She said she “dove headfirst into songwriting” and gathered her songwriter friends around her.
“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,” she said. “I used the staying out too late at honky-tonks. 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.”
The number needs care. Lambert first put the 75 songs within a year, then corrected herself to roughly the first four months after moving back. Either way, it was her estimate of how much she wrote in that period, not a count of finished, released songs. Most of those songs did not end up on an album. The point she was making was about volume and momentum: she was writing constantly, with people she trusted, instead of waiting for the feeling to pass.
She also said the period felt “magical” as a songwriter. That may sound odd next to the word “misery,” but it fits how she described the work. She had missed songwriting. Being home in Nashville, with old friends and a guitar, gave her a way to use a painful time rather than only endure it.
A marriage in the public eye
Lambert and Shelton met in the mid-2000s and married in May 2011. They announced their divorce in July 2015, after four years of marriage. Both have since remarried. Lambert married Brendan McLoughlin in 2019. Shelton began dating Gwen Stefani in late 2015 and married her in 2021.
Lambert had spoken about the split before. In a 2022 interview, she said she was not prepared for it. The new podcast comments do not reopen old arguments. They look back, more than a decade later, at how a difficult personal period shaped her work.
That distance is part of why the comments landed. Lambert is not speaking in the middle of a split. She is describing, with time behind her, what the writing process looked like and why it mattered to her.
The album that came out of it
The writing fed into Lambert’s sixth studio album, The Weight of These Wings, released on 18 November 2016. It was a 24-song double album, split into two discs called The Nerve and The Heart. Songs on the album include “Vice,” “Tin Man,” and “We Should Be Friends.”
The album was different in approach from the record before it. Lambert said she had written Platinum, her previous album, by coming into town to write specifically for that record and then leaving again. With The Weight of These Wings, Nashville was home, and the songs came from daily life: friendships, late nights, and the long process of starting again.
“Tin Man” is the clearest example. Lambert has said the song began in Marfa, Texas, after songwriter Jon Randall suggested a trip to West Texas, away from magazines and attention. She wrote it with Randall and Jack Ingram, finished it in Nashville, and later revisited it with both of them on The Marfa Tapes in 2021. The song is spare and direct, and it has become one of the best-known songs from that period of her career.
The 75 songs Lambert remembers writing are not the same as the 24 songs on the finished album. A double album is already a large project. The larger number shows how much material she worked through to get there.
Why this interview stands out
Celebrity interviews about past relationships often stay vague. This one stands out because Lambert gave specifics about process: where she was living, who she was writing with, how fast she was writing, and which album the work became.
It also stands out because she kept the focus on songwriting. She did not present herself as a victim, and she did not turn the interview into a comment on Shelton’s life since. She talked about her own work, in her own words, and about friends who helped her through it.
For listeners, that is the useful part. The story is not really “what went wrong in 2015.” It is “what did she make from it, and how?” The answer, in her account, is a lot of songs, written quickly, with people she trusted, in the city she had come home to.
FAQ
When did Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton divorce?
They announced their divorce in July 2015, after four years of marriage. They had been together for about ten years in total.
How many songs did Miranda Lambert write after the divorce?
Lambert said she believes she wrote about 75 songs in the period after moving back to Nashville, much of it in the first four months. That was her estimate of songs written, not the number released.
Which album came from that writing?
The Weight of These Wings, released on 18 November 2016. It is a 24-song double album, split into The Nerve and The Heart, and it includes “Vice,” “Tin Man,” and “We Should Be Friends.”
What did Lambert say on the podcast?
On the 27 October 2026 episode of Ross Golan’s And The Writer Is… podcast, she called the divorce “a really not fun time,” said she moved back to Nashville and dove into songwriting, and described using the “misery” of the period as material for new songs.
The wider point
Lambert’s comments are a reminder that a well-known album often starts in an ordinary place: a room, a guitar, and friends who show up. The divorce was public and painful. The response, in her telling, was private and practical. She went home, she wrote, and she kept writing until the songs became a record.
That is also why the interview fits alongside other artists telling their own stories in their own words, as in the Sophia Bush memoir review. The value is not in gossip about the past. It is in hearing, from the artist, how the work was actually made.
