Miranda Lambert’s debut cookbook, Y’all Eat Yet?: Welcome to The Pretty B*tchin’ Kitchen, began as a game in 2020 with “my mom and her best friends.” Each week, the women’s husbands would pick one ingredient. They’d make a dish out of those five ingredients with one rule: no Googling. While the singer thought it would make a “cool little book,” manager Marion Kraft “had different ideas.”
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“I started thinking about how many amazing stories and songs have come from the memories with these ladies and around a table and our camping trips,” Lambert tells American Songwriter. “We decided to make it a bigger idea and worked on it for three years, and here we are.”
Many of Lambert’s early songs came from conversations around the dinner table. She’d observe information about life through stories she heard from the adults as well as the women and children her parents took in. (Lambert’s parents were private investigators.) One song, “Use My Heart” from Lambert’s 2016 album The Weight of These Wings, was inspired while asking her grandmother the recipe for her giblet gravy.
“I was videoing her dressing recipe because I never wanted to forget it, and she was saying what you do with all the organs, how you make the gravy,” Lambert recalls. “I said, ‘What about the heart?’ She said, ‘I don’t have the nerve to use the heart,’ and it hit me so hard. As a songwriter, you hope that you pick up some lines like that, but you never expect it from your grandmother.”
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The thought of loving you just makes me sick I don’t have the nerve to use my heart
“Songwriters are only as good as the people they meet and the stories they hear,” Lambert writes. “Those tales keep your creativity inspired and your heart soft for what people are feeling.”
Photo: Y’ALL EAT YET? Copyright © 2023 by Miranda Lambert with Holly Gleason. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
