Miranda Lambert Wrote This 2017 Song in Tribute to an Early Kenny Chesney Hit

In 2017, Miranda Lambert released “Tin Man”. The song, written by Lambert, Jon Randall, and Jack Ingram, is part of her 2016 album, The Weight Of These Wings.  

 Lambert openly admits she drew inspiration from a song,  “The Tin Man”, which Kenny Chesney released twice. Chesney’s “The Tin Man” was first released as his second single in 1994. Seven years later, Chesney recorded a new version of the same song, which became a Top 20 hit for him.

Of course, both songs are about the character in The Wizard of Oz who doesn’t have a heart.

Chesney’s “The Tin Man” says, “It’s times like these / I wish I were a tin man / You could hurt me all you wanted / And I’d never even know.” The gut-wrenching lyric inspired Lambert to pour her heart out in her own “Tin Man”. 

“This song sort of wrote itself,” Lambert tells The Tennessean. “I was a little worried at first about writing another song like that. But I told Kenny…I felt the same emotion I feel when I hear that song. I was feeling it myself, and the other two co-writers were feeling it as well. It comes from the same place, and I guess it inspired it.”

What Miranda Lambert Says About Writing “Tin Man”

Lambert’s “Tin Man” starts with, “Hey there, Mr. Tin Man / You don’t know how lucky you are / You shouldn’t spend your whole life wishing / For something bound to fall apart.”

Lambert later explained more about what inspired her to write “Tin Man”. The song came out two years after her split from Blake Shelton. The Weight Of These Wings had several songs that referenced that painful chapter in her life, including “Tin Man”.

“Whatever influenced you the most at whatever time of your life, it some way or another comes out in your art,” Lambert tells iHeart. “’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,” she adds. “And it just opened my eyes to it even more, going through pain myself. [It was] sort of an epiphany.”

The Weight Of These Wings also includes “Vice”, a Top 5 single for Lambert. “Tin Man” was nominated for two Grammy Awards, including one for Best Country Song.

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