TJ Osborne Dishes on Collaborating With Miranda Lambert on New Album (Exclusive)
TJ Osborne gave us the scoop on what it was like working with Miranda Lambert on his band's new album, and let's just say he didn't hold back.
Parade spoke with the 38-year-old country crooner ahead of the release of the brothers' fourth studio album–the self-titled Brothers Osborne–and during our conversation, the topic of a very special feature came up.
According to Osborne, working with Lambert on the newly released "We Ain't Good at Breakin' Up" was "a lot of fun," and despite a somewhat controversial summer for Lambert, he had nothing but nice things to say about her–even calling her "selfless."
"Typically, I don't usually like writing with other artists," he exclusively dished, "it can be really challenging."
He continued, "You get in the room, and they're trying to write for us and we're trying to write for them, and it just ends up a song that, at the end of the day, it's for no one."
Thankfully, that wasn't the case when collaborating with Lambert, as Osborne noted, "Working with Miranda, I was really impressed. She just really came in as a writer."
Per Osborne, while Lambert may be a "superstar," she was able to take "that hat off" and be "really there as a writer."
Apparently, Lambert wasn't meant to be on the final version of the track, as she was there to write. But, as Osborne exclusively told Parade, he felt their version was missing something that the demo didn't lack: the "essence" of Lambert and her "dreamy and moody" vocals.
Though she wasn't given an official verse, she agreed to record a final version of the song, which Osborne said "was really selfless of her," as he doesn't know many artists that would agree to that. "I thought that was cool."
Elsewhere in the convo, the singer-songwriter hinted at the song's origins and how it came to feature the "Actin' Up" artist. "You know people would ask me if we're still together," he said of his relationship with Abi Ventura. "And I would just tell them, 'yeah, we're not very good at breaking up,'" he shared, clarifying that "it's a joke" and the two are very happy.
But apparently, the joke inspired a song within the trio of artists in the room–Osborne, his older brother John and Lambert–as John suggested they turn his brother's joke into something, "We gotta write that."
And so they did, proudly featuring it on the band's new album.
As for what else fans can expect from the fourth studio album? Osborne put it best when he said, "There’s something you can always learn from new experiences with new influences and it was time for that."
He concluded, "And you know I think the songs themselves, we worked really hard on that, to not go into the studio until we felt we had everything together and there really wasn’t any compromise in how they were written or quality of the song.”
Brothers Osborne is available now.
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