In addition to being a bustling bar, Tex-Mex restaurant and venue, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa on downtown Nashville’s Broadway strip also serves as a de facto Museum of Miranda. Artifacts from the country superstar’s career punctuate the place — including the birdcage she sang from in the 2019 video for “Bluebird,” one of her seven career Billboard Country Airplay chart-toppers.

Though the second floor only has a photo of the birdcage, she tells me the real thing hangs from the ceiling by the performance space on the third floor. Does anyone ever try to sing from it? “I’m sure they have, late at night,” she deadpans. “That’s why we hung it from the ceiling.”

Though Lambert and I are having late-morning drinks (a Tito’s and Topo, her go-to), she’s not quite kicking back. Lambert has a well-earned reputation for hard-edged, hard-living Texas outlaw songwriting, but she’s down for some glam when necessary — in today’s case, some significant beauty prep before we even meet — though in typically practical fashion, she’s scheduled other video interviews for later today to make the most of it.

“I have to sit in the hair-and-makeup chair for two and a half hours; I want to make it worth it,” she explains. “[Female country artists] have two and a half hours of hair and makeup before we do anything. Boys don’t have to do that!”

That work ethic, combined with her strategic efficiency, should come as little surprise to those familiar with the veteran singer-songwriter’s career and catalog. Lambert’s 20-plus-year career has taken her from Texas breakout phenom and critics’ darling to country radio fixture and award-winning machine to now not-quite-elder stateswoman, as the 42-year-old has become both a mentor and trusted collaborator to the next generation of hitmakers. At a point when some veteran artists in her position might happily ease into the legacy era of their career, Lambert is as furiously and smartly prolific as ever, with 2026 shaping up to potentially be one of the biggest years of her career — and a totally different kind of big than her 2016 or 2006.

As Lambert has evolved, the one ceaseless constant has been country music. While she’s sometimes rocked harder than the rockers or struck more iconic poses than the pop stars, she has remained proudly, resolutely country throughout.

“I definitely do not take it lightly that I am a representative of country music,” she says. “I am a country singer-songwriter. That is who I am. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be. There wasn’t ever really a question in my mind of like, where I fit in in a genre or what I wanted to do. It was country music, period, the end … It’s a huge honor to be one of the ones that’s been representing [it] now for over 20 years.”

And while Lambert is too active and relevant for any talk of her passing the torch, sharing the glory with the next generation of country artists, particularly other women, has become a major priority for her. No recent accomplishment exemplifies this better than her work as co-writer/producer of Ella Langley’s smash hit, “Choosin’ Texas,” for which Lambert just won the Academy of Country Music (ACM) awards for song and single of the year.

“What I’ve done is try to use the knowledge that I’ve gained by being in the industry for over 20 years to really lift up the younger generations coming up and trying to be there for them and answer questions,” she says. “Sometimes I know the right way to do it, because I did it wrong.”

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Lambert has been a country mainstay since 2005, when she parlayed being a finalist on reality TV competition Nashville Star into a deal with Epic Nashville and released her debut album, Kerosene. Commercial success came slowly, but the album and the blonde Texan firestarter behind it — a prodigious singer­-songwriter with the rare combination of toughness, smarts, sensitivity and blinding star power — proved unforgettable.

That debut and its even more accomplished 2007 follow-up, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, sold well and established Lambert as a year-end-list favorite, but mainstream country audiences weren’t totally on board. “I hadn’t had radio success, and I hadn’t really stepped into my headlining [status] — like, I just needed to take it up a notch,” Lambert recalls.

She did just that with her third album, 2009’s Revolution, which secured her foothold at country radio, first with the RIAA multiplatinum-certified “White Liar,” and then with the Country Airplay-topping ballad “The House That Built Me,” now a signature song of hers. Revolution kicked off Lambert’s greatest period of Nashville success, with her next two albums (2011’s Four the Record and 2014’s Platinum) generating six top 10 Country Airplay hits between them.

But with her acclaimed 2016 double album, The Weight of These Wings, Lambert’s country radio success became more erratic; none of its singles hit Country Airplay’s top 10, and in the decade since, she’s only reached it twice as a lead artist.

“When you start off young and things are working … eventually, something’s not going to work at some point,” she says now, remembering how even her first Revolution single, the solo-penned “Dead Flowers,” stalled on the charts before “White Liar” offered her chart redemption. “I think the first loss is the hardest. Like, ‘Nobody likes my song, my single dropped off the chart, my ticket sales are s–t…’ I needed to learn the lesson of, like, move on to the next. That’s happened so many more times now that I’m like, ‘Oh, whatever, y’all pick another one.’ ”

Even as Lambert’s radio dominance has become less consistent, she’s remained successful in other ways. Each of her five solo albums between 2011 and 2022 reached the Billboard 200’s top five and was nominated for album of the year at the ACM Awards. (She has won the category a record five times in her career and is the most decorated artist in ACMs history, with 35 wins, not counting honorary awards.) She’s also been nominated for the Grammy for best country album (including her 2026 nod in the rechristened best contemporary country album category) five times in the last decade alone, including her second win in 2020 for Wildcard. And throughout her career, Lambert has been one of the few mainstream country artists to receive consistent critical acclaim from non-country publications; indie tastemaker Pitchfork named The Weight of These Wings one of its top albums of the 2010s.

“You got to draw your own map — at least that’s what I felt like I had to do for my career,” she says. “I had hits that weren’t even singles. I had singles that were not hits. I had some amazing opening slots for some really amazing tours. I had some shows where it wasn’t my best show. I was on the journey, and I’m thankful for all of the moving parts of it — because it taught me to pivot when I need to pivot and to not get stuck in [thinking], ‘I need a hit song,’ or ‘I need to sell this many tickets,’ or ‘I want to sell this many records.’ ”

“I think that now she is more open, and she can kind of do whatever she wants,” says Crystal Dishmon, Lambert’s co-manager with Marion Kraft (both have a handshake deal with Lambert, as she does with every member of her core team). “She doesn’t necessarily have to prove herself. And, you know, I think there’s freedom in that … Now, she can kind of color with all the colors in the crayon box. And let’s see where it takes us.”

“Make your art,” Lambert concludes. “Go make it, and then do the work after to get it out there to the people. That’s the other part, you know? The art part is the fun part.”

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In 2026, Lambert’s map has led her to not just the biggest hit of her career, but the biggest hit of the year so far. It just happens to not really be her song.

“Choosin’ Texas,” the breakout smash for country sensation Ella Langley, is rapidly becoming the kind of hit without chart precedent. It not only sped to the top of Country Airplay and Country Streaming Songs but has also topped the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks and counting, becoming the longest-reigning No. 1 for a woman country artist in the chart’s 68-year history.

And Lambert is involved in the game-­changing smash not just as an oft-cited influence and door-opener for Langley — the two duetted on Lambert’s “Kerosene” at the 2025 ACMs — but also as a co-writer, co-producer, backing vocalist and music video co-star. She even helped provide the “Texas” in its title; Langley recently told Billboard that Lambert’s own story of once getting pulled over in a car with her pet kangaroo — and what she imagines the cop’s reaction must have been — inspired the song’s “She’s from Texas, I can tell…” hook.

“It was not on my bingo card for ‘Choosin’ Texas’ to take over the world,” Lambert says. “I love that song, and it so feels like such a part of me. I’m from Texas, and it was one of those things where we just wrote this song we really loved, and all of a sudden… I’ve never seen anything like it. So when Ella calls and is like, ‘What does this mean?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. You might need to call Taylor Swift right now [and ask her], because this is, like, that kind of big.’ ”

For Langley, Lambert’s support and guidance have proved invaluable. “There’s not a rule book to this job,” Langley says. “So [it’s helpful] to be able to have someone like her to ask questions [like], ‘Should I be doing this?’ She’s like, ‘Hell yeah, you should be doing this!’ It’s just a cool time for the both of us.”

What excites Lambert most about the track’s success is that, unlike most country songs that have reached this kind of crossover stratosphere, it’s done so without making any obvious concessions to the pop market, a culmination of pop (and streaming) audiences’ 2020s embrace of all things country. “It’s country as s–t!” she summarizes. “It’s throwback country. Ella’s influences are very much ’70s and ’80s country, and that’s what we were going for. And I feel like more ears are on country music now because of it. I’m so thrilled about that.”

The artistic and commercial megasuccess of “Choosin’ Texas” also led to Lambert co-­producing and executive-producing Langley’s ensuing ­Dandelion album, which has turned into one of the year’s biggest releases, topping the Billboard 200 for two weeks. Though Lambert has written for other artists before — including scoring a Hot Country Songs No. 1 with the world’s biggest country artist as a co-writer on Morgan Wallen’s 2022 single “Thought You Should Know” — sitting in the producer’s chair for another artist is new for her; after all, Lambert only officially slid into that role for her own albums starting with 2022’s Palomino.

“I’ve never had a record in the world that I was just a co-producer, not the artist — so Dandelion has been a pretty cool feeling,” she raves of Langley’s recent full-length. “I was texting Jon Randall, my best friend and co-producer, like, ‘I’ve never known the feeling that this is before, just having a beautiful masterpiece in the world that I got to have a hand in doing that doesn’t say my name on the front.’ It’s really a crazy feeling and I love it.”

As involved as she’s been with Langley’s recent successes, Lambert is quick to clarify that she sees herself as “really just kind of a hype girl” for the rising star. “I’m either talking her off a ledge or hyping her up, because she knows exactly what she wants,” she explains. “We’re girls; we talk each other off the ledge all the time.”

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The energy that “Choosin’ Texas” has injected back into Lambert’s career as a recording artist is also palpable. As Dandelion hung around the Billboard 200’s top five in May, it was joined by Kacey Musgraves’ Middle of Nowhere, which features a duet with Lambert on perhaps its buzziest track, the Tejano-flavored reconciliatory singalong “Horses and Divorces.”

“She was like, ‘I know we’ve had our times where we just have drifted apart… careers went separate ways, marriages, whatever… The two things we have in common are horses and divorces,’” Lambert recalls of Musgraves’ pitch for the duet. “And she said, ‘I want to write it with you and Shane McAnally and put it on this record.’ And I was like, ‘Damn right, we’re doing that.’ ”

Lambert is also now back with her own new single — the irresistible “Crisco,” which she calls “one of the most fun songs I’ve ever recorded,” and whose discofied groove and “Southern Nights”-name-checking lyrics explicitly call back to the days of rhinestone bell bottoms. “Country music ebbs and flows, and there has been a ton of overlap [with disco] over the years,” Lambert explains. “There hasn’t been a surge of it in a while, so I hope I’m inspiring people to remember that part of country music that we all love so much.”

The single is also Lambert’s first release since signing with the Nashville-based MCA label, following a two-year run on Republic. “When I started my career, I told my manager I wanted a 50-year career. I’m over 20 years in and still have a lot of fire left in me,” she says. “Having my label in Nashville focused on continuing to elevate my music and career was important to me.”

Her many music projects as a performer and collaborator barely scratch the surface of what Lambert has going on in 2026. There’s her responsibilities at Big Loud Texas, the label imprint she founded with Randall in 2023 — which has already had breakthrough success with singer-songwriter Dylan Gossett — and her MuttNation foundation, which supports the adoption of shelter pets, her “other passion besides music.” And of course, you can occasionally find her tending bar — unofficially — at Casa Rosa.

“I just want to be open and kind of let the universe bring to me what’s supposed to happen,” Lambert says. “And just let the world tell me the direction I’m supposed to go — rather than being so set on something. Because I think that that’s why I got here, is because I was like this,” she says, pantomiming uptightness. “But now I’m like, ‘What are y’all doing? Let’s create something together.’ ”

Additional reporting by Jessica Nicholson.

This story appears in the May 30, 2026, issue of Billboard.