Miranda Lambert has spent more than 20 years as one of country music’s biggest stars. Beginning with her debut “Me And Charlie Talking” single, from her freshman Kerosene album, Lambert has had hit after hit on the radio.
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But just because her songs are loved by her fans, not all of them landed at the top of the charts. These four Miranda Lambert songs are all big hits, even if they are not No. 1 singles.
“Gunpowder & Lead”
One of her more popular singles, “Gunpowder & Lead” shows off Lambert’s fiery side. On her sophomore Crazy Ex-Girlfriend record, Lambert and Heather Little are the writers of the song.
“Gunpowder & Lead” peaked inside the Top 10. The song is about a girlfriend who is about to get the final revenge on her abusive boyfriend. “Gunpowder & Lead” says, “I’m goin’ home, gonna load my shotgun / Wait by the door, and light a cigarette / If he wants a fight, well, now he’s got one / And he ain’t seen me crazy yet / He slapped my face, and he shook me like a rag doll / Don’t that sound like a real man? / I’m going to show him what little girls are made of / Gunpowder and lead.”
“Tin Man”
“Tin Man” is on Lambert’s vulnerable The Weight Of These Wings album. Out as a single in 2017, Lambert wrote “Tin Man” with Jon Randall and Jack Ingram.
“Tin Man” references the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. She also drew inspiration by Kenny Chesney’s “Tin Man”, which he released in 1994.
The song says, “Hey there, Mr. Tin Man / You don’t know how lucky you are / I’ve been on the road that you’re on / It didn’t get me very far / You ain’t missin’ nothing / ‘Cause love is so damn hard / Take it from me, darlin’ / You don’t want a heart.”
“Whatever influenced you the most at whatever time of your life, it some way or another comes out in your art,” Lambert says (via iHeart). “The ‘Tin Man,’ I guess going through a lot of times where I felt pretty empty, I understood a whole new meaning. I mean, how many times have we seen The Wizard Of Oz? But, something that the world shares is, everyone knows what the Tin Man represents: cold, and empty, and loneliness, and heartless. And it just opened my eyes to it even more, going through pain myself. [It was] sort of an epiphany.”
“Tin Man” wasn’t a No. 1 hit for Lambert. But it did earn an ACM Award for Song of the Year.
“Run”
“Run” is Lambert’s recent single. On her 2024 Postcards From Texas project, the vulnerable song Lambert wrote following her split from Blake Shelton, but was unwilling to release it until early 2025. Lambert wrote “Run” by herself.
The track didn’t do as well as some of Lambert’s other singles, but it’s still a stellar song. “Run” says, “I’m tryin’ to survive in / This state of defeat / Is it you or I that really lost me / I’m looking for someone / I wasn’t with you / We held on for dear life, babe / But both of us knew I was gonna run / I was gonna run.”
“Automatic”
“Automatic” came out in 2014, on Lambert’s Platinum album. Written by Nicolle Galyon and Natalie Hemby, “Automatic” is a look back at earlier times, before everything became so automatic in life.
“Automatic” says, “Hey, whatever happened to waitin’ your turn / Doing it all by hand / ‘Cause when everything is handed to you / It’s only worth as much as the time put in / It all just seemed so good the way we had it / Back before everything became automatic.”
Photo by Mary Kouw/CBS via Getty Images
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