Miranda Lambert did almost no press in support of her most recent album, 2016's The Weight of These Wings. In a rare and very candid new interview, the superstar admits she simply couldn't face the questions she knew she'd get in the wake of her divorce from Blake Shelton.

"It was going to be hell, and I’d already been through hell," she tells Holly Gleason in the second installment of a remarkably unvarnished interview with Hits Daily Double. "It was hell putting it on paper, putting my words on paper. So I didn’t want to rehash. I’d finally gotten to a place where I wasn’t sad anymore. All the sad moments were there, all the truths were right in those songs. All you had to do was listen. I didn’t need to say anything."

Lambert and Shelton married in May of 2011, and they announced their divorce on July 20, 2015. The emotional fallout from their breakup and the ensuing public attention served as the fodder for The Weight of These Wings, an ambitious double album that changed Lambert's career by focusing more on her roots as a singer-songwriter and less on radio success. The result was a platinum album that is one of the most critically acclaimed projects of the last several years. It won Album of the Year at the 2017 ACM Awards, and "Tin Man" took home ACM Song of the Year honors in 2018.

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Lambert initially decided to put off speaking to the press until they had heard the new music. But even afterward, when she attempted to give an interview in support of the album, she faced questions about her personal life right off the bat — specifically about Shelton's new girlfriend, Gwen Stefani.

"When the music was out, people had listened, I got on the phone for the first interview. First question was, 'How do you feel about Gwen?' I hung up. I told Marion, I just can’t do this," she recalls.

"What was in the music was real, and I wanted people to get it from that. Take from it what they would," Lambert adds. "Then if I needed to talk, I would. But I haven’t really. Until now."

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