Miranda Lambert Spills on Blake Shelton Divorce: Honky-Tonk Nights, Heartbreak and 75 Songs

Miranda Lambert is revisiting her split from Blake Shelton-and the country superstar has quite a songwriting tally to show for the heartache.

According to Taste of Country, Lambert opened up on Ross Golan's And The Writer Is... podcast about the painful aftermath of the former country power couple's 2015 divorce. Between touring, navigating her own emotions and having two very public careers involved, there was precious little room to fall apart privately.

"I got divorced and that sucks for anyone, especially in the public eye, especially on tour, especially in the middle of a very public career-two of us," Lambert said. "It just was a really not fun time."

Then came Nashville, late nights and a whole lot of writing.

After moving back to Music City full-time in 2015, Lambert gathered her songwriting friends and poured her experiences into the work that helped shape The Weight of These Wings. The heartbreak supplied plenty of material-and apparently, so did the honky-tonks.

"When I moved back [to Nashville] in 2015, I gathered up all of my friends and relationships from, you know, all of the previous years and just used it, used the misery," she recalled.

Just how productive was that chapter? Lambert estimated she wrote 75 songs, initially describing the timeframe as roughly a year before correcting herself to the first four months after her move.

That is a lot of feelings finding their way onto a page.

"I used the staying out too late at honky-tonks," she continued. "I used what I was living and my friends went on that journey with me-friends being songwriters."

For Lambert, the freedom to follow those feelings gave her songwriting room to grow. She described a process driven by raw emotion, with less concern about fitting a particular sound or maintaining her famously feisty persona.

"It was worth laying it out there," she said.

Lambert and Shelton ended their marriage in 2015 after four years as husband and wife. Both later remarried: Lambert wed Brendan McLoughlin in 2019, while Shelton married Gwen Stefani in 2021.

But this glimpse into Lambert's post-divorce writing life puts the spotlight back on the music. Seventy-five songs, a circle of trusted friends and some very late nights: that is quite a chapter behind The Weight of These Wings.