Miranda Lambert has been at the apex of the country music mountain long enough to enjoy the view.

As a 35-year-old woman in a music genre not exactly known for gender equality, she remembers the long and rocky climb it took to get there.

“I didn't even have a top five [song] until I was on my third record, even though all my records went platinum,” Lambert said in a recent phone interview with The Blade to promote her Friday night concert at the Huntington Center, 500 Jefferson Ave.

“I was playing 250 shows a year and was on big tours but I didn’t have a hit, so I guess, yes, it’s been there for a long time. I think I was just persistent enough to break through. And I think if a couple of us can break through, [we] can open the door for everybody else. But then I feel like I hit a wall again. I don't know why that it is, but I don't let it stop my career.”

The Blade

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The “wall” Lambert referred to is radio’s lack of support for female country artists, and how that limited airplay often negatively affects a song’s commercial success. Her 2017 single “Tin Man,” for example, won the American Country Music Awards’ Song of the Year, yet it failed to crack the Top 20 on the country radio chart.

Audience familiarity with an artist’s newer material is often a byproduct of radio support, and a boon to the concert performances. “It totally changes your live show when people have heard your music,” Lambert said. “It's great to have radio support ... but you can't let [the lack of support] defeat you, either.

“I also know that it really isn't our fault. A lot of us are delivering great music [and] it's just not getting played.”

That's the why of how all-female supergroup the Highwomen came to be: a means to call attention to and to overcome the lukewarm embrace of country-singing women by country stations. It’s a similar origin story from nine years ago for Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley as female trio Pistol Annies.

“I think it’s great for women to create art together,” Lambert said, “and there's no reason not to do it. It just makes us that much stronger.”

That said, Lambert added that she believes the industry is changing for the better in promoting and embracing female artists.

“People are tired of the conversation, me included. I think we were finally loud enough that we couldn’t be ignored anymore.”

Lambert has employed a similar strategy of being seen and heard to support and further the careers of young and little-known female artists. Her ongoing Roadside Bars & Pink Guitars Tour features a rotating all-women roster as her special guests: Maren Morris and Elle King, Tenille Townes, Ashley McBryde, and Caylee Hammack, as well as Pistol Annies.

“It's girls that are really amazing, at all levels,” Lambert said. “Lifting them up, it’s action and not just talking about it.”

In her nearly 15-year career that’s arguably still picking up momentum, Lambert already has dozens and dozens of industry accolades (34 Adult Country Music Awards, 13 Country Music Awards, two Grammys) and chart-toppers (six albums that debuted at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Country Album Chart).

But those trophies and her success aren’t much of a topic during this nearly 20-minute phone interview, an easy back-and-forth conversation that surprised Lambert by how quickly it went by, especially when she realized she had to quickly end it to accommodate the back-to-back phoners also scheduled that morning.

And despite tentative forays into other topics, including her new marriage to a New York police officer and a life away from music that includes dinner parties, invariably, perhaps inevitably, the talk turned to the artist's thoughts and concerns about her art. This included Lambert's take on the trends-turned-bandwagons that are often at the forefront of country music.

As an example she noted the popularity of those feel-good tailgating songs, which may make for great background tunes for boat rides and when driving on back roads, but are certainly not everyday staples — or at least, shouldn’t be.

“That's not all there is to offer, you know what I mean?” she said with a laugh.

Then, getting serious, she noted how the big push to only publish and play specific song types was and still is creatively repressive.

“You kind of felt defeated,” Lambert said. “No matter how hard you were working, all these songwriters and all these artists trying to really come up with something cool, something different, and something artistic, and it wasn't getting any attention.

“There's room for a lot more things, [but if] we’re only giving the public one type of song, how are they supposed to know about anything else?”

On a more positive note, Lambert said she thinks there's been a shift in that trend in the last year. “If you listen, it's less tailgates and more like actual songs about love and life and real things, which I'm really thankful for because I'm really tired of that.”

Her seventh studio effort, Wildcard, to be released on Nov. 1, is a reflection of that kind of diversity in styles and in music. The east Texas-born and -raised Lambert grew up on a steady diet of classic country, newer country, and music that has nothing to do with country, including an “out-of-the-box” affinity for alt-rock supergroup Audioslave.

And her love of rock royalty including Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Fleetwood Mac can be heard if not felt on Wildcard, as with the punkish, guitar-cranked single “Locomotive.”

“I definitely got on a [Bob] Seger, Fleetwood Mac, and Zeppelin kick for the last year. Sometimes when you get older [and] you've heard all these songs, you hear them in a different way. I feel like all of that definitely creeps into this record.”

Then the country singer offered this assurance to her purist fans: Sure, “there's a little bit of those [rock] artists' vibes” in her music, “but I'm still a through-and-through country singer, no matter what I do.”

First Published September 19, 2019, 4:02 p.m.