Jon Randall, Jack Ingram, and Miranda Lambert. Spencer Peeples While sitting in a parked car in Marfa last September, the musicians Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, and Jon Randall listened to their “work tapes”—what songwriters call raw recordings they typically make just after finishing a song. These iPhone recordings documented the trio of Texas natives’ four trips over seven years to West Texas, where they occasionally held loose songwriting sessions. Lambert had already turned two of them into hits—2019’s “Tequila Does” and the Academy of Country Music’s 2018 Song of the Year, “Tin Man.” But relistening to their tapes that fall night, it occurred to Lambert that most of the trio’s work wasn’t likely to reach any listeners. So she proposed they record slightly better versions of the songs and release them as an album. “That was probably the Tito’s talking,” Lambert says. “But the next morning, in the sober light of day, it still felt like a legitimate idea.”