Miranda Lambert will play Madison Square Garden in March, but on Tuesday night at Exit/In, while waiting in line on whim in hopes of catching the country star's impromptu club gig, we almost expected her to pop out of a side-door and ask someone in line for a light.
Lambert, who has been in town rehearsing for an upcoming tour — which runs through August, with no Nashville date announced as of yet — announced the free show on Twitter late Tuesday afternoon. The soundman told us he's worked for Lambert for 11 years and only just learned where the gig was at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. But seeing as how we last caught Lambert lighting the fuse for a stadium-sized crowd at last year’s CMA Fest, she’d have no problem filling the venerable club and making the fire marshal nervous past 500 people. Hell, she could've filled the place 30 times over at this point.
When The Spin arrived at around 5:30 p.m., the line of Lambert Twitter followers stretched down Elliston Place, around the corner at Hurry Back and down Louise Avenue. It would eventually nearly reach Cafe Coco, and luckily it looked like almost everyone who waited it out in the cold made it into the club. Doors opened at 7 p.m., and about an hour later the lights went down as the woooooooaaahhhs of Lambert and Carrie Underwood’s summer 2014 anthem “Somethin’ Bad” blasted out of the PA. But Lambert and her band were nowhere in sight. Nearly the entire song played, with the crowd cheering sporadically with a sort of confused excitement, before the band walked onstage and kicked into 2011’s “Fastest Girl in Town.”
Part of Lambert’s appeal is the way she wields arena-worthy star power but still gives off the sense that she really can handle a drink and a pistol, like the down-to-dirt woman in her songs. So while it was striking to see her in such a small setting, it also seemed to make perfect sense when she appeared onstage in a T-shirt and worked through a two-hour, 28-song set that was country enough for a bar further downtown, but not out of place in a sweaty rock club.
Without “much fuss,” as Lambert said, she worked all sides of the small stage as she burned through newer tracks from her 2014 release Platinum, like the hit single of the same name and “Little Red Wagon” — a punchy rock tune that has twice as much attitude live — as well as old crowd favorites like 2005's titular Kerosine track and the rip-roaring set-closer “Gunpowder and Lead” from 2007’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Each member of the band, which included Steelism's Spencer Cullum Jr. on pedal steel, led their own song — backup vocalist and former The Voice contestant Gwen Sebastian’s near-a cappella cover of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” was (against all odds) a highlight. The encore included a Dixie Chicks cover (“Cowboy Take Me Away”) featuring RaeLynn, also a Voice Season 2 contestant, who will support Lambert on some of her upcoming dates. Lambert closed the show dueting with Sebastian on a note-perfect cover of Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush."
To our delight, the show also came with all the little charms that make us love small shows in small venues. The occasional feedback, for instance — “It’s a club show, people,” Lambert told the crowd. “There’s feedback at club shows.” Or the guy who apparently tried to get onstage and was summarily manhandled and thrown out by security. “Someone just got tackled!” Lambert bantered, clearly amused at the commotion. “I feel so home right now. This is where I started, people.”
As if any encouragement was required, she urged the crowd members to enjoy themselves.
“We’re drinking, are y’all drinking?” she asked everyone early on. “That’s not many people. I know you have to work tomorrow, but you can have a couple!”
We do, and we did. So when the singer took a sip and raised her blue solo cup in the air, we were right there with her.
