Lambert Women

In the middle of writing her seventh album Wildcard, Miranda Lambert hit pause. “I took the first long stretch I’ve ever had off in my entire career since I was 17,” she tells Apple Music. “Finally you realize how much you need a breath.” During that break, the country superstar made some big life changes, surprising the world by announcing that she’d secretly gotten married and was moving part-time to New York City—a switch-up that she says revitalized her creative energy and breathed new life into her sound. “Oddly enough, on my seventh solo album, I feel like I approached it more like my first album than any other record I’ve made,” she says.

Between 1789 and 2006, only 35 of the 1,875 people who were elected to serve in the United States Senate were women, so 2006 became a banner year when 14 women held seats in the Senate (and two more were elected in the mid-term elections held that year).