0:00 – 0:41

Ashley: “Stop Drop and Roll One” actually came from a night when we all were sitting around at Miranda Lambert’s farm. It was later in the evening and we probably all had some buzzes going on. We just finished a song, when Miranda goes, “Whew, we’re on fire. I think!” Then she goes, “Stop drop and roll one!” And so then, we just started writing. We wrote it really fast, but we were collecting stories from us and our friends. When we were headed to a bar one night, one of our friends Amy had actually said, “You think I’ll leave that bar covered in men?” So, we wrote that in there. We wanted it to be fun and funny.

0:42 – 0:45

Miranda: It’s actual quotes put into melody. Most of it.

0:46 – 0:52

Angaleena: And it’s like dumpin’ out a girl’s purse too. Like one’s got the lashes. One’s got the Tylenol…

0:53 – 1:08

Ashley: It’s setting everybody up for “okay this is them. This is who they are.” And,
Stop Drop and Roll One” is so clever. When Miranda said that, I didn’t hear it the first time. Then I remember she said it again, “Stop drop and roll one!” And I was like, “what?!” I had never heard that. I think it’s a very clever title.

1:09 – 1:17

Miranda: It was an accidental co-write. It was just an accidental song. But, it is like dumpin’ out a purse. That’s good.

0:00 – 0:15

Miranda: “Best Years” is a song about everybody. It doesn’t even have to be a mom. It’s just somebody that’s trying to do their best. It definitely comes from that mom’s perspective.

0:16 – 0:17

Angaleena: Inspired by your friend, Lacey. 0:18– 0:40

Miranda: Inspired by my friend, Lacey. She is a stay-at-home mom, a really good one, and she had sent us a text. Ashley and Angaleena were bridesmaids with Lacey in my first wedding, so far. And I texted her back saying, “I’m writing with the Annies. Just wanted to say hi.” Lacey wrote back, “write a song for an overworked mom.” And we sent her back that song in like an hour.

0:40 – 0:59

Ashley: I like that the first line is, “I got the need to take a recreational Percocet.” Because I started that line and I knew I was savin’ it for us. And it’s funny. I like that people laugh at that. And then it spins at the end, “these are the best years of my life.” It’s a sad song but it’s also true.

0:56 – 1:00

Miranda: It’s finding humor in your everyday struggle.

1:00 – 1:25

Ashley: Or, chin up. These are the best years of your life, almost. Even when I sing that line on my verse…it’s like, I’m reminding myself, as opposed to pouting. I’m kinda goin’ like, “these are the best years of your life, look around.” With a recreational Percocet here and there I guess…

Angaleena: Moderation.

Ashley: Moderation.

Angaleena: Moms have to moderate… ‘Mom-eration.’

Angaleena: “Five Acres of Turnips” came from when I was on the road. I was in a hotel, by myself. I think I had been driving through the English Countryside all day, which reminded me of home because England looks a lot like Kentucky, where I’m from. And, I just started thinking about family and roots. My mom used to say “You can’t draw blood from a turnip.” So I came up with that line and all I had was “Five Acres of Turnips” and a melody. I was flipping through my phone and was like, “hey, here’s something.” And both of them were like, “What was that? Oh my god. Play it again.” So then I started playing it and they just took off with it. But it is about home. It’s about secrets. There is a dark side, but then it comes full circle and you see the beauty in the darkness by the end of the song.

0:00 – 0:45

Miranda: “When I Was His Wife” was an Annies’ title, for sure. It came to me the day we wrote it. I didn’t save it for the Annies. I just started writing it and was like, hold on, this is for the girls. It just came to me. So when I sent it to these girls, I just sent the first verse and a chorus and said, “Here. I think this is Annies. What do y’all think?” And literally in five minutes, I got a verse back from each one, each girl. And, it was perfect, so I just did a work tape and the song was done. It’s kinda insane and that was the first song we had written in a couple of years. So that is the official first song of this project. It was cool. I think it just set us up to get off and running. It opened the gate.

0:46 – 1:10

Angaleena: Yeah. I was so inspired, because I was doing a show with Brandy Clark that night. So, I was sitting backstage while Brandy’s show was goin’ on, and we’ve all written with Brandy and we all love her. So I was writing with the Annies while I was watching Brandy. It was like girl power, short circuiting. Overload.

0:00 – 0:22

Miranda: I feel like the woman that wants to be as free as Cheyenne. And Cheyenne is a woman who feels like she can be whatever she wants to be. But, there’s a loneliness and sadness to her, I think, that’s in all of us. I feel like we captured the feeling of both of those women from our three perspectives. I wanna be both.

0:23 – 0:54

Angaleena: You are.

Ashley: Yeah. You are. Congrats. Somebody who is sensitive and gets their heart broke easily, would wanna be like, “man, I wish I could be cold, and I could be like that girl, that can just break everybody’s heart and not care.” But then, when you really get to see Cheyenne, you’re probably like, “oh there’s a reason why she had to get so cold.” I think that it’s a complex song when you dig in because there are all different reasons why everybody is doing what they are doing.

0:55 – 1:21

Angaleena: She’s like a superhero. And then the other girl is like the superhero who has to put on her disguise. I mean, you can’t be a superhero every second of every minute. You have to tone it down and relax and put your disguise on. And it’s both of those characters in that song.

Ashley: I like that. I see the video.

Miranda: We need capes ASAP!

Ashley: We need capes right now… three!

Angaleena: Tiaras, please, with stars!

0:00 – 0:34

Ashley: I think it’s so important to tackle real issues and talk about stuff we’ve been through in our life with a spin of humor. I love to laugh. I think it’s important. So, when we wrote this song, I told them, “Man there’s a lot of people right now that are going through divorces and they can’t find the silver lining. And, they’re going to be so happy when they hear this. They’ll be able to dance and maybe smile for the first time in a while.”

0:24 – 0:36

Miranda: It’s a way of reclaiming your humor after you’ve been so sad. You know, heart broke, and all the things that divorce is. To me, it’s celebrating re-claiming a part of yourself.

0:37 – 0:45

Ashley: You, your name! Your original last name is always important to a girl anyways. So, it’s like I got it changed back. Back to me.

0:00 – 0:11

Ashley: Everybody’s got a little power in this song. I think the girl knows what she wants in this song. And we really went for it. Obviously with “Hell on Heels,” we liked the term “Sugar Daddy.”

0:12 – 0:26

Miranda: I think everybody in this song knows what they want and they’re getting it: the girls and the sugar daddies.

Ashley: Everybody is happy.

Miranda: Everybody knows that it’s a mutual agreement of, “you’re using me for this and I’m using you for this. Let’s call it.”

0:27 – 0:46

Angaleena: Yeah, and our tastes show up. In my verse, that would be my sugar daddy. And that would be their sugar daddy in their verses. So you get to see a little bit of our personality and what we like in boys.

Ashley: Oh yeah!

0:00 – 0:22

Miranda: In my opinion, the two people in “Sugar Daddy” can’t keep that up forever. It’s a business deal. Contracts run out. “Leavers Lullaby” is the back half of that relationship, I guess. We didn’t really plan for them to be in that order. But listening down, it made a lot of sense.

0:00 – 1:02

Angaleena: I think my mom inspired it. My mom got married when she was sixteen and my dad was eighteen, and they’re still together. When I went off to college and started doin’ wild things, my mom had a really hard time with it because I don’t think that she ever got to have that. She went to college, but she had three kids when she was going to college. So she didn’t get to party that much. When I started partying, she got a little judgmental at times. I always wondered what our relationship would have been like if she had have gotten to experience those things. So, that was where the song came from. Then these two thought about their moms and added stuff that they could relate to about their mom’s relationships.

1:03 – 1:36

Ashley: I think it’s interesting that all of our moms really love, or loved, our dads and us. So every time it gets to that line…and, we were their life and are their life. That’s one thing that we all can relate to is this feeling that our moms did everything for us. And we are definitely, all three, wilder than our moms were.

Angaleena: And we’re all still really close with our moms too. Ashley: It’s mainly a question. A question song.

0:00 – 1:09

Angaleena: My hometown in Kentucky…how many times have I talked about it? My hometown, my hometown, my hometown.

Miranda: Hey, pride’s good. I’m from Texas! What are you talking about?!?

Angaleena: My hometown has been really, really affected by the opioid crisis. I can’t count on two hands how many funerals I’ve been to. There are so many levels to being close to addiction and being close to someone who has an addiction issue. And this is just one of the layers in the onion, and it’s after someone has become incarcerated. By that point, you’ve tried everything that you can think of to help your loved one. You have to get to a point where you have to draw a line and have some boundaries. To the listener it might sound like this woman is cold and uncaring, but the reality is that her heart is breaking in a million pieces because she has this loved one, and there’s nothing else that she can do for him. So, this one’s pretty raw.

1:10 – 1:27

Ashley: We all know people and they know people, and they know people that have loved ones in jail and no one really talks about that either. We have not heard a song recently about that. It does set a clear boundary in this song of, “I love you, but I can’t help you anymore.”

01:28 – 01:47

Miranda: Yeah. I think it captures the emotion. An addiction like that is like prison, whether you are in prison or not. I think it’s capturing the emotion of how it feels to be close to someone in a position where you cannot do anything. ‘Cause if you do, it enables. So, it’s not just a literary sense. It’s an emotion.

01:48 – 2:04

Angaleena: We all wanted this song on the record. And, I think the goal was for it to open conversations and maybe help families who are struggling with it. “Hey, did you hear that crazy Pistol Annies song?” It’s just so that someone hopefully won’t feel like they’re going through it alone.

0:00 – 0:42

Miranda: Life definitely wrote ‘Masterpiece.’ It was at a time where we needed to write this song. I needed to write it, and I needed to write it with my sisters. There wasn’t anybody else I could have captured that with. When you go through something hard, the people that love you go through it with you. That was one of those moments of writing, similar to “Commissary” or “good day to take a recreational Percocet,” where we all jump on each other’s emotion and go… “oh yeah, I feel that too. Let’s write about it.” But ‘Masterpiece’ is a magical song and needed to be written for so many reasons. And I feel like we did a beautiful job at telling the story.

0:43 – 0:52

Ashley: Yeah, and it could be us too. I do feel like that when we’re singing it. Baby we were just a masterpiece…

0:52 – 0:54

Miranda: It’s any relationship.

0:54 – 0:56

Ashley: It is. It’s something that’s just sacred. And so special. 0:57 – 1:13

Angaleena: It is something that is so precious. “Who is gonna be the one to take it down?” I don’t want to be the one to. Even if it gets to where it really sucks. You still feel this pressure to stay in it. But our relationship doesn’t suck. We love each other so much.

1:12 – 1:22

Ashley: Every line of ‘Masterpiece,’ even though I have heard it so many times, I still go “Oh, wow!” I can’t believe we wrote that.

1:23 – 1:43

Miranda: And it’s one of those where, if we still had CD’s, you’d push pause. You’d give yourself a minute before you’d go to the next song, and just go, “what just happened? What did they just say?” I mean, I still do and we wrote it, but I’m proud of it because I think we really told a story in a beautiful way.

0:00 – 0:34

Miranda: “Interstate Gospel,” to me, is such a strong statement. Everybody drives down the street and sees these church signs. Some days they hit you right in the heart, even when you weren’t expecting it. When Ang came with that title, it was striking to me. Once we had that title and that song written, there wasn’t really a need to discuss, “should we call the record this?” It just felt like what we were doing was preachin’ the truth.

0:35 – 0:44

Ashley: It’s kind of like a little hymnbook on it’s own. There are different life songs on there from the Annies’ hymnal.

0:45 – 0:48

Miranda: The Annies’ hymnal! That’s a scary book to read…

0:49 – 0:52

Ashley: Don’t read it like the bible. Just sing along.

0:00 – 0:46

Ashley: “This Too Shall Pass,” might be the oldest song on the record actually. That night that we wrote it, I think Miranda went to bed early.

Miranda: I peaked early that night.

Ashley: Yeah, you peaked to soon, and crashed. It was late and you came in my bedroom (motions to Angaleena) with that idea. But anyway, I do love this song because I feel like it’s any relationship. I really do. It could be your family, it could be us, it could be whoever you’re in love with, your kid… it could be anything. And, “This Too Shall Pass” is just so comforting, and it’s so true. I get chills every time I hear all of our voices come in on the chorus of “This Too Shall Pass” because it’s just powerful. It feels like an accidental anthem. Just to bring people together.

0:46 – 1:24

Miranda: We’ve been friends, me and you (looks at Ashley) for thirteen-fourteen years. Us, (looks at Angaleena) we are creeping in on nine or ten. We have all lived with each other through what we thought was the end of our worlds, or the biggest thing in our life that was happening. We thought the sky was falling. We were all chicken little at one time or another. But, we gave each other comfort saying, “you’re gonna get through this. Everything’s gonna be fine.” And then it was. So, I feel like this is just a reminder.

Angaleena: It’s about finding your people. And stickin’ with ‘em. Ashley: Amen sister.