By Chris Talbott May 6, 2010
Lamberts tell story of ‘House That Built
Me’
Singer didn’t write song, but it still reflects difficult time in
family’s life
LAS VEGAS - Miranda
Lambert and her parents always swear they're not going to cry when they talk
about the country firebrand's latest single, "The House That Built
Me."
It goes the same every time, though. Within minutes, all three are in
tears. And how could they not be, when the song reflects a difficult eight-year
period in their lives that included homelessness and despair? When they talk
about the song — or even just hear it — so many emotions rush back.
Lambert didn't write her country top 10 hit, "The House That
Built Me," but she might as well have. Written by Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin, it's a pitch-perfect retelling of her childhood
and the Lamberts were shocked when they found out she didn't pen the song.
After they wiped away the tears, of course.
"It's like the persons that wrote that song were channeling into
our lives at that horrible but great time in our lives," Rick Lambert, 58,
said. "It was so many mixed emotions during that time because we actually
lost everything we owned. We actually lost a house that we built with our own
hands."
About twenty years ago, the Lamberts were
private investigators in Lindale, Texas. A few bad business decisions doomed
the company and left the family of four, including Miranda's younger brother,
with few options.
"'You're three months away from bankruptcy' is what they say, and
that's what happened," Bev Lambert, 50, said. "Four months down the
road, we're just like, 'What's happened here?', and we're homeless
literally."
Killing animals, eating from garden
The Lamberts stayed with family for a while, but needed a place of
their own. Bev noticed a nearby house, a rental property that gave her a
strange sense of hope.
"And every day I was like, 'If we could just have that house. If
we could just get there we could get back to normal,'" she said.
"What my wife failed to tell you is that house was in such bad
shape they were going to bulldoze the house down if we didn't rent it,"
Rick said.
Some of the rooms didn't have windows and everything needed fixing or
replacing from floor to ceiling. The Lamberts eventually got that house,
though, and moved in. They lived in one room at a time while Bev started a
reclamation project.
She also planted a garden and tended it every day, pulling what the
family needed from the ground. And Rick provided the protein.
"I would kill game animals," he said. "I really didn't
care if it was in season or not. This was subsistence."
The family raised rabbits — "and we got to name two, that
was it," Miranda said — and other animals for food as well.
When the Lamberts revisit that time in their lives, their emotions
vary. Shame and pride. Fear and joy. There are just as many laughs as there are tears.
The 26-year-old singer first heard "The House That Built Me"
when it was sent to boyfriend Blake Shelton. It was immediately powerful to
Lambert.
Shelton insisted she take the song.
"It was beautiful," Lambert said. "I mean, I just
started bawling from the second I heard it. He was like, 'If you have a
reaction to this song like that, then you need to cut it.'"
Her parents, who retired from the private investigator business a few
years ago and live on land that borders that old house, simply refused to
believe Lambert didn't write the song. The imagery matched their lives in every
way.
The family did bury their dog of 14 years in the yard of that rundown
house — just like it says in the song.
And the little room at the top of the stairs is, in fact, where
Miranda did her homework and learned how to play guitar.
"And this guy didn't know us," Rick said of Douglas, who
credits Shamblin with the idea for the song.
The friends, who've logged many No. 1s separately, were at a songwriters event when Shamblin brought up a kernel of a song over breakfast. He was interested in the idea of
how powerful the memories of houses are for people. They started to shape that
idea into a song, looking for a nice turn of phrase, something like "the
house that he built."
"I believe Allen twisted it to not 'the house that I built,' but
'the house that built me'" — just talking about that quintessential
home that everybody has had," Douglas said. "I guess the song does
strike a chord of universality because I think even if you haven't had the
home, it's the feeling of it's the home you want to have or the home you're trying
to create."
As the operator of Lambert's fan club, Bev knows firsthand how
universal that song is. The response to it has been powerful.
"So every single day I cry, because every single day I get
somebody's story and somebody's grandma raised them and somebody was homeless
and it reminds me of where we were at the time," Bev said.
Turns out all those details were just coincidences, moments drawn out
of the songwriters' lives. Put them all together and Miranda Lambert thinks
it's a triumphant tale that's also deeply personal.
Like the narrator in "The House That Built Me," she believes
those struggles turned her into the tenacious, fiery, hardworking woman who is
shaking up country music today. The Grammy nominee won three Academy of Country
Music Awards in April, including album of the year for the critically acclaimed
"Revolution," and she recently had her first No. 1 single with
"White Liar."
It looks like "The House That Built Me" may be her second as
it continues to climb the charts. That would be quite the happy ending for the
Lamberts.
"It's such a sad story, but it's really such a happy story
because it really just built our family back and it made us stronger than
ever," Miranda said. "And it made me."