Miranda Lambert is sharing the story behind her “A Song To Sing” duet with Chris Stapleton. The song was written by Lambert and Stapleton, along with Jesse Frasure and Jenee Fleenor.
“I had a date with Jesse Frasure,” Lambert recalls on SiriusXM‘s The Highway. “He randomly reached out to Chris kind of last minute and was like, ‘Hey, you wouldn’t happen to be around today? Me and Miranda are just writing for kind of fun … just trying to write songs,’ and Jesse’s so amazing. He has all these groovy tracks and kind of pushes me out of my three chords and the truth comfort zone in a great way. And Chris was available, so he came over.”
Fleenor, an award-winning fiddle player, had already worked on the track for what became “A Song To Sing.”
“[It had] this groovy kind of ’70s thing going,” Lambert recalls. “So she wasn’t in the room that day, but her parts really drove this beat. We wrote two songs that day, but it’s been around for a couple of years. It just wasn’t time; I guess we couldn’t really figure out what project it fit on, or where it should go. We went to Savannah and cut it with Dave Cobb last year, and that was great.”
Lambert reveals that she and Stapleton looked to two of their musical heroes, namely Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, for inspiration in recording “A Song To Sing.”
“I got to just hang in Savannah for a couple days with the Stapletons and drink some wine, and cut a record to channel our inner Kenny and Dolly,” Lambert says.
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“It was really fun,” she continues. “On our group text, the memes we keep sending are all the Kenny and Dolly. We really wanted to fully go there, and I feel like we did, and paid homage to our heroes.”
Lambert and Stapleton might have been channeling Rogers and Parton in the song, but Lambert was also inspired by looking at Stapleton and his wife, Morgane.
“The song makes you feel good,” Lambert says. “So it was like, ‘Let’s sing about a love story in a good way.’ And no one’s lived a love story on the road like Chris and Morgane, obviously, and how the music can ground you and bring you back together, in the same way that ‘Islands in the Stream’ makes you feel. It’s that. It’s that feel-good, heartwarming, you just kind of want to sway and hug the person you’re with. It’s all okay. We’re all right. Because the road is a tough life. And if you can find somebody that can put up with it, and love you through it and feels like home away from home, then that’s kind of what the song is about.”
“A Song To Sing” is available to download or stream here.