NEW YORK — One night not long ago, Miranda Lambert was drinking wine on her porch in Nashville, Tennessee, with a friend who’d planned to drive home. Lambert discouraged her from getting behind the wheel: “You’re way too pretty for prison,” she said. The next day, Lambert and three other songwriters turned that phrase into a song.
NEW YORK — The National is a band of five men, but on a May afternoon, they were 13 men and women. Onstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, they rehearsed for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” bundled in wool caps and scarves to brace against the theater’s Arctic air conditioning. After running through a stammering new song about emotional paralysis, “You Had Your Soul With You,” the musicians requested some tweaks.
Singer Ian Hunter recently announced a reunion tour of Mott the Hoople, the British band that recorded some memorable hits in the early 1970s. But, Hunter tacitly acknowledged, it wasn’t quite a reunion.
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