Miranda Lambert Breaks Down Singing “House” at First Concert Back

via Highway Vagabond (YouTube)

They say home is where the heart is, and sometimes that is not a physical place, but a place in time. Very often many of us don’t feel at home in our own domiciles, or towns or cities, or even our era in time, especially these days, leaving one in an ever-present feeling of uneasiness. You turn on the corporate radio station, and wonder where it all went wrong for country music, and who would ever listen to that racket. It feels so foreign.

Miranda Lambert went home this weekend; back to Texas where she’s from. Raised in Lindale a little east of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex, you can be sure Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth known as the “World’s Largest Honky Tonk” loomed large in her ethos when she was growing up, while also being there to offer her a stage and an audience earlier in her career.

As the pandemic has put a kibosh on big gatherings, Billy Bob’s has also become one of the few places that can accommodate live music, and from larger names due to the location’s massive, 100,000 sq.ft. capacity facilitating some 1,200 fans socially distanced. This is the reason Miranda Lambert and other big country names have booked shows at the location, which Lambert sold out three consecutive nights at this weekend (4-22 thru 4-24).

One of the reasons music fans cherish the live music experience so much is it’s often the only opportunity to truly feel at home, surrounded by like-minded people, sharing moments you know you’ll remember for years, or forever. You could be from right down the street, or you could have flown in from Atlanta. It doesn’t matter. In those moments, you’re enveloped with those warm feelings embodied in the term “home.”

Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” written by Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin is one of those country songs that you know folks will still be listening to 100 years from now or more. Because it embodies that sense of “home” like no other. Lambert’s known to get a little weepy on stage, including during “The House That Built Me.” But after performing the song hundreds and hundreds of times by now, the emotion of those moments has to be mostly sapped for her, even if they still feel fresh to the audience.

But when she took the stage Thursday night to perform “The House That Built Me” on a stage that must feel like home, and in front of a live audience for the first time in too long, it was too much.

It’s these moments that we’ve lost, that no live stream will ever replace, and no video will ever do justice to (though it’s appreciated for sure). It’s the reason that live music and the places and people that make it happen must be preserved at all costs. Because for some, it’s the only sense of home they will ever experience, and the only respite from a world that feels forever foreign.

“They say, you can’t go back home again.”

But Miranda Lambert did Thursday night. And took the rest of us with her.

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