Settling Down

Miranda Lambert first met New York City Police Department officer Brendan Mcloughlin in late 2018 when she was in the Big Apple promoting the Pistol Annies' third album and he was on security detail. They quietly struck up a relationship. This pensive, mid-tempo acoustic track finds Lambert reflecting on her newfound romance and how settling down with her boyfriend might affect her life. "I always have an itch to find a new adventure, but I'm also always ready to walk through my front door," Lambert explained in a press release. Lambert and McLoughlin got married on January 26, 2019 in Davidson County, Tennessee.

Lambert wrote the song with Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby shortly after getting hitched to Mcloughlin. The same trio also penned her "Bluebird" hit single.

I'm a wild child and a homing pigeon Caravan and an empty kitchen Bare feet on the tile with my head up in the clouds I'm one heart goin' both directions One love and a couple of questions Am I settlin' up or settlin' down? Lambert has always felt being torn between a wanderer and a homemaker, and her mom used to call her "a wild child and a homing pigeon." The singer already had her "wild child and a homing pigeon" hook when she arrived at the songwriting session with Hemby and Dick. She mentioned her idea to the pair, and it led them to a conversation about how a well-lived life usually requires balancing the two feelings. "This song is full of paradoxes of wanting to do two things that don't necessarily jive, wanting to do two things that are a little bit at odds with one another," Dick told Billboard. "You want to be a troubadour, playing from town to town, but you want to wake up in your own house and make your own breakfast and be with the people that you love every day. The life of the artist is much more of a whirlwind than most people's. But artists are still people too, and everybody wants those roots."