A couple of weeks ago, the great country star Miranda Lambert got together with her songwriting collaborators Jack Ingram and Jon Randall to release The Marfa Tapes, an extremely cool lo-fi experiment of an album. Along with the LP, they also made The Marfa Tapes Film, a documentary about the three of them making that album — recording live, outdoors, with one microphone and no second takes. The doc streamed live on Facebook earlier this month, and after it got a good response, they’ve made it available to buy or rent on Apple TV. And now Lambert has also released a new song that plays in the documentary. Paradoxically, this song is probably more accessible than anything on the album. It’s topical, too, though it hopefully won’t be much longer.

Lambert’s new song “They’ve Closed Down The Honky Tonks” is a quarantine lament. It’s not a political song; it’s just a song about being sad that you can’t go out to bars and hear live music anymore. It’s a song about how this shit sucks, and that’s pretty indisputably true. It continues to suck, though it hopefully won’t suck for much longer.

Lambert wrote “They’ve Closed Down The Honky Tonks” herself during the early days of quarantine. It’s a soft, pretty acoustic song — stripped down, but without the studio-free trappings of The Marfa Tapes. Lambert sings the absolute hell out of the song, and she brings a sincerity that keeps the track from coming off gimmicky, even when she’s just reeling off the names of various famous honky tonks. Check it out below.

The Marfa Tapes is out now on Vanner Records.