Miranda Lambert w/Chris Young, Jerrod Niemann
Izod Center
Saturday, January 28

Better than: Being a good girl.

At around 9 p.m. on Saturday, the lights went down at the Izod Center and Beyoncé's "Run The World (Girls)" began blaring from the speakers. Loretta Lynn's image came up on the screens hanging above the stage; she spoke of how Miranda Lambert, the former Nashville Star runner-up turned arena headliner, was, in her mind, the real deal. From there a rapidfire montage of females who could be identified with one name followed: Oprah, Jackie, Gaga, Bettie, Dolly. And then Lambert herself took the stage, clad in a skull t-shirt and knee-high boots, and launched right into "Fastest Girl In Town," one of her many rollicking odes to living life as a bad girl.

Hearing one of her chart-topping hits—the vengeful "Gunpowder & Lead," the accusatory "White Liar"—makes Lambert's appeal pretty obvious; she's operating as both an outlaw country star and a confessional crooner, ready to show her scars to any comers and kick the shit out of those people who might cross her. She delivers all of this with a brio that isn't quite sunny, yet remains bright and thrilling; "I like that innocent smile when you know you've done something bad," she said after tearing through the burn-it-all-down anthem "Kerosene." The screeched assent indicated that a lot of women in the audience agreed.