Fans of real-deal Nashville should know Hall of Fame songwriter Tom Douglas. From the early 1990s through today, he’s been part of Music Row’s smart set. He’s co-author of landmark songs with layers of meaning, from Chris Janson’s sneakily feminist “Drunk Girl” to the Miranda Lambert masterpiece “The House That Built Me.” In conversation with Stephanie Lambring, I learn that we have another reason to be grateful to the 71-year-old Atlanta native. Douglas convinced Lambring, one of the best writers to emerge in the past five years, to get back in the game after a period of disillusionment and retreat.
“I started waiting tables. I wasn’t writing anything. I wasn’t going to shows. I wasn’t listening to music. I took a hard break. I felt this kind of identity crisis,” she says in Episode 295. But she’d known Douglas from some co-writes and he’d come into her restaurant and check in with her. “And it had been about a year since I had written anything, and he finally kind of nudged me and said, ‘anybody can write a song in two weeks. When you write something you love, send it to me.’”
She made the deadline, writing a song called “Daddy’s Disappointment,” about a woman whose path sounds remarkably like her own.
I was 23, got my first big break
Learned how to make a living out of old heartache
Burned out 16th Avenue ’til I had nothin’ to say
Just a pawn in a game I never wanted to play
The song made Tom Douglas get misty and he told her so. That validation encouraged Lambring to regroup and rethink her approach to the peculiar pursuit of telling stories with words and music. Team-written songs for others was out. Writing for and from herself was in, leading to her solo debut album Autonomy on Thirty Tigers in 2020. Then came her second album Hypocrite, which cut through the noise, grabbed my fickle attention, and quickly became one of my favorite records of 2024.
So let’s fill in the gaps. Lambring grew up in rural Indiana, down a country road from John Mellencamp’s hometown. She talks about the conservative culture of her community and her church and how that meshed with her own nature as a “rule follower” and it’s some remarkably candid and important stuff. You can also glean some of the hangover from all that in her new song “Purity Ring,” a story of a teen abortion told with tense energy and an economy of language that would make Hemingway nod.
When she came to Nashville to attend Belmont University, Lambring says her mindset was on performing and on a path to country stardom, but if “Daddy’s Disappointment” is our guide, this future was more other peoples’ idea than her own. Stephanie’s musical heroes were Alanis Morissette and Jewel, though she liked country as well. And when she did start writing, as is almost inevitable in Music City, she showed blazing potential, landing a publishing deal, when they were hard to come by, at BMG at age 23, just as her song says.
Two years of daily co-writing later, without the success that such mega-corp positions demand, she moved to Carnival Music, arguably Music Row’s most artist-friendly hit factory, a writer-loving culture that counts Adam Wright, Brent Cobb, Gretchen Peters and Aubrey Sellers among its standouts. Lambring fit. She loved the team, and she wrote all the time. But you now know what happened next. After five years of chasing hits, she asked to be let go with a year left on her contract.
After the hiatus and the prod from Douglas, Lambring toured behind the praise and playlist exposure that followed Autonomy. She also kept her writing momentum going, dusting off old ideas and continuing to work on recording with her first album’s producer Teddy Morgan. He’s recorded or produced John Oates, Kevin Costner, Elise Davis and Brandy Zdan, and on Hypocrite, released last April, they’ve conjured a contemporary folk vibe that edges into indie rock without getting pretentious or precious. Lambring’s voice, even over the synth organ bass part of opener “Cover Girl” and its Casio-tinged drum beat, is rich and limpid and honest. And the lyrics, all written solo, are topical, insightful, clever and precisely assembled.
“Cover Girl” sets up one thematic thread of the album - a study of women navigating a 21st century digital panopticon of social pressure, conformity, autonomy and fulfillment. The penultimate song “Two Faced” is an energetic bop about insincerity, including in the music biz, that would make a fantastic cover by a contemporary country star like Lainey Wilson. But for me the highlight is “Filler,” a brooding lament about self-image, self-esteem, and the products we mass market to treat them, as if they were an illness that needed curing. The multiple shadings of the title took my breath away. This hour also plays "Hospital Parking," a heart-rending song about our fears of losing our mothers. See the lyric video below.
Lambring has not been a performing, touring artist all that long now, and she tells me she loves the road, from the new cities to the stage (of course) to the merch table and even inventory. She’s on tour for the next month in the midwest and Eastern seaboard, including some openers for Sierra Hull and a date at Mountain Stage on Oct 6. Find out more at StephanieLambring.com. And please enjoy this revealing, thoughtful conversation.
