Miranda Lambert upset over being asked about views on weapons
Texas country singer Miranda Lambert was already slated to open for Carrie Underwood at the Capital Hoedown a week from Friday. The unexpected part is that now, in a different way, she's serving as an opening act for the fall Parliamentary session and the reopening of the great Canadian debate on gun ownership.
Lambert, a Grammy winner and major star of the country music scene, is an outspoken gun enthusiast. Her logo, tattooed onto her arm, is a pair of winged pistols.
No stranger to publicity, she has graced the cover of Garden and Gun magazine and has been honoured by Field and Stream magazine for her deer hunting hobby; she has at least three stuffed heads mounted at home.
But over the past few days, country music news websites have been running stories about a run-in Lambert is reported to have had with a Canadian journalist over her views on guns.
The stories grew from a couple of tweets of Lambert's last week: "Dear mr writer at the Ottawa Citizen: next time u interview me, let's keep it about the music and not about your view on my stance on guns ... I don't talk politics period. I'm Not sure all Canadians would like to Be put in your category. Speak for yourself not your country.
Thx!"
Few were as surprised by the growing media sensation as Patrick Langston, the freelance music writer for the Citizen who interviewed Lambert last week.
Langston, whose story on Lambert will run in the paper this weekend, said he was "totally surprised" by the tweet and the avalanche it caused after what he described as a friendly interview mostly about her music and her development.
Langston said he asked her about her cover version of Time to Get a Gun by Canadian singer-songwriter Fred Eaglesmith, which is on her third album, Revolution.
Eaglesmith's lyrics describe a man who hears about crime close to home and ponders getting a gun. Critics have spoken about the way Lambert's version strips the irony from the Canadian song and makes of it a straightforward gun anthem.
Langston said he asked Lambert about that and Lambert, a self-described "lifetime member of the NRA" said she did mean it without irony.
"It's time to get a gun," she told Langston, explaining her message.
It was at that point that Langston says he asked her about her views, and she said she didn't want to get political.
Then the web lit up, with country music media on the story and Langston doing a radio interview on Y1010 this morning.
Meanwhile, Fred Eaglesmith himself, reached by the Citizen Tuesday night in Kindersley, Sask., where he was readying to play a 100-seat community centre, said he was fine with the Lambert version of his song, even if it is different from his.
Eaglesmith said his mid-'90s song is not anti-gun, but it does come from a place in the Canadian psyche.
He explained that the song reflects a real moment he had where he contemplated the idea of getting a gun. He said the feeling behind the song, though, was the surprise he felt when he arrived at the point where such a thought actually entered his head.
"I sort of went, 'Wow, I am thinking this.' "
Although he's had a long gun at his farm at various times in the past, he did not have one at the time that he wrote the song and writing it did not lead to his going out to buy one.
"Oh, no. Of course not," he said.
At the same time, Eaglesmith said he thinks Canadians are often much too smug about American gun culture.
"We think we're sort of above that."
He said when he plays in Texas, he sometimes asks how many people in the crowd have a gun with them. The count has been as high as 12 at a small venue.
"You know when you go to a concert, like at the Black Sheep (in Wakefield) or somewhere in Ottawa and there's that rude guy talking in the back and yelling and screaming and heckling the artist, you know that? You never see that in Texas."
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