Miranda Lambert is “Driving Back There in My Mind” in New Song

Miranda Lambert is giving life to a previously unearthed song. On Thursday (September 6), Lambert dropped “Driving Back There in My Mind,” a Western-tinged ballad that offers a refreshing take on a small-town song. The lyrics find Lambert as a woman from a rural town now living in the big city who’s homesick and longing for those two-lane roads that led to nowhere and the way the stars came out, shining down in the night air.

I got some dirt on my wheels/Got a song on the radio/Every mile is memorized/And it won’t let me go/Right where the dirt road meets the asphalt/Meets the real world and says goodbye/I’m always driving back there in my mind, Lambert croons over a waning steel guitar melody, letting each word take its time.

Penned by Lambert’s frequent collaborators, The Love Junkies – the writing trio of Lori McKenna, Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey – “Driving” was released as part of Apple Music’s Lost & Found program. Lost & Found takes previously unrecorded songs by some of Nashville’s top songwriters and pairs them with major artists to record in Spatial Audio.

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“The process of picking one was a lot harder because it’s [The Love Junkies], and there’s so many gems,” Lambert explains to Today’s Country Radio host Kelleigh Bannen. “I just group-texted them. I was like, ‘What do y’all think?’ I just wanted to make sure I was digging deep in the well of what they had because they have so many that feel so right for me. And the one that I was thinking about, I didn’t feel like it was 100% yet. So Hillary had dug ‘Driving Back There In My Mind’ out of some vault in her phone, and it just felt really me, and it felt really good. It’s old-school country to me.”

“I was just in awe of how [Miranda] made it her own,” Rose said in a statement. “I loved the song and I loved the work tape, and I loved when we wrote it. But Miranda took it to another level, and I could see the picture of what was going on in the song. It was a song that I could see the video, the way she captured it and just sang it. It was just amazing.”

The Lost & Found program was launched in July 2023 with Jelly Roll’s recording of the Jesse Frasure, Josh Thompson and Ben Hayslip-penned “Dragging These Roots.”

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