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Austin was the other half of Miranda Lambert’s real-world music education. In a Garden & Gun magazine “Texas Truth” interview she shared with fans, Lambert credited the city directly: “The music scene in Texas was such a blessing because I was always going to shows in Dallas and Austin — like Willie and Jack Ingram and Wade Bowen shows — to absorb everything I could.”
She was a teenager from East Texas making the drive to watch songwriters work, years before she ever set foot in Nashville.
Austin’s singer-songwriter circuit — the same scene that produced Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, her future Marfa Tapes collaborators — gave Lambert a model for writing and performing that had nothing to do with major-label polish.
She finished third on Nashville Star in 2003, but by then she’d already logged years of stage time absorbing what Texas songwriters sounded like when nobody outside the state was watching.
