Jack Ingram / Miranda Lambert / Jon Randall - The Marfa Tapes

Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert and Jon Randall have released The Marfa Tapes. Somewhere between a demo collection, a live album with no audience, and a lo-fi left turn, the country trio’s desert recording session focuses on the simple joys of songwriting.

In 2016, reeling after her divorce from fellow country star Blake Shelton, Miranda Lambert took a trip with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, two other Texans in the country music business. Together, Lambert, Ingram, and Randall went down to Marfa, Texas, the tiny desert town with the art installations and the fake Prada store and the occasional psychedelic indie music festivals. Lambert has been to Marfa with Ingram and Randall a bunch of times. She’s said that the place has “good mojo” for her and her two collaborators.

This past September, at loose ends what with the pandemic and all, the three of them returned to Marfa, where they sat around a campfire and wrote songs. The next morning, the three of them listened to the voice notes that they’d recorded on their phones, and Lambert decided that those voice notes should be an album. The songs were good enough, and if they never came out, then too many of them would probably just disappear. Maybe they’d become demos or whatever. Maybe they’d be forgotten. Instead, we get to hear those songs in rough and lo-fi form. That’s the idea behind The Marfa Tapes.

Heavyweight double vinyl produced by RCA Records in 2021. Gatefold sleeve