Miranda Lambert on Husband Brendan McLoughin’s Reaction to Her Recording ‘Dammit Randy’

• Miranda Lambert’s new album features a songwriting credit from her husband, Brendan McLoughlin
• The song, titled “Dammit Randy,” came from a jam session they had during the COVID lockdowns
• When McLoughlin found out his wife cut the song, he got “misty-eyed”

Miranda Lambert’s upcoming album features a songwriting credit from a very special someone: her husband Brendan McLoughlin!

Lambert is set to release her latest record, Postcards from Texas, on Sept. 13. But she’s already released a handful of tracks off the album, including “Dammit Randy,” on which McLoughlin is credited as a co-writer.

In a new interview on Bunnie Xo’s podcast Dumb Blonde, Lambert, 40, opened up about including McLoughlin, 32, in her creative process, and explained that they first started jamming together during COVID lockdowns.

“Everyone was at home, bored, and I’m a songwriter so I’m like, ‘Let’s write songs!’ And so he was like, ‘I don’t know how to write songs,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yeah you can, you can do it.’ So I get the guitar out, we start writing, and he’s actually really good. Like he has some really good lines. I mean, being a New York police officer, he’s lived enough life to like, have some good lines in here.”

The “If I Was a Cowboy” singer said she and McLoughlin, who tied the knot in January 2019, worked on about four or five “little tunes” together — which was enough to give McLoughlin a confidence boost. Before long, he was boasting to their friend Jesse Frasure about how writing was “easy” — and so Frasure dragged him into a four-and-a-half-hour-long writing session.

The three-time Grammy winner said McLoughlin quickly realized that songwriting was no picnic. But as Lambert began work on Postcards from Texas, and her co-producer Jon Randall realized that perhaps they could put McLoughlin to work one more time.

“We kind of started talking about leaving Sony and signing with a new record label, and really just talking about having a situation that doesn’t serve you anymore, and moving on from that and what a fire it lights under you,” Lambert said of her chat with Randall. “Jon Randall’s my buddy, but his name’s actually Randy, so we always say, ‘Dammit Randy’ to him. And so we started writing this song and Brendan kept popping in while he was watching football. I was like, ‘Are we doing this? In or out? You’re going to have to turn the game off. Pick a side.’”

McLoughlin, a retired New York City police officer, opted in, and before long, he had a seat at the table beside Randall and his wife. What came from the session was “Dammit Randy,” a song off the new album that Lambert released in late July, along with “Alimony” and “Wranglers.”

“He wrote some of the greatest lines in the song,” she said. “It was really special actually, because the situation I wrote the song about, Brendan is my husband, so he’s had to hear me bitch about it for so long, that he kind of knew the story better than I did, you know? So he had the same emotion in it that I did and so I’m real proud of him.”

When it came to including “Dammit Randy” on the album, Lambert had a surprise in store for McLoughlin. 

“I was like, ‘I want to play you something.’ And so the whole band knew he’d written it, so we’re all just staring at him, and we’re like, ‘Push play,’” she recalled. “He won’t say it, but he got a little misty-eyed. He was like, ‘You cut my song?’ It was awesome. And it’s one of my favorites on the record.”

Lambert and McLoughlin tied the knot just three months after they met on the set of Good Morning America, where she was performing and he was working security.

In May, she told PEOPLE that the couple’s one major rule was all about “communication.”

“We just talk it out, whatever it is, we talk about everything,” Lambert said. “And I think communication is super important, especially because women, we expect men to know what we’re thinking and they don’t. We got to tell them.”