Last month, the transcendent country star Miranda Lambert and her songwriting partners Jack Ingram and Jon Randall teamed up to release The Marfa Tapes, an intimate, stripped-down experiment of an album. The three friends went to the Marfa, Texas cabin where they sometimes write songs, and they recorded themselves singing a bunch of new songs, and a couple of old ones, outside, campfire-style. They used first takes, left in mistakes, and sang and played into one microphone. For an artist who usually makes very slick, controlled music, this was a huge departure.

It’s been fascinating to see Lambert promoting her left-turn record to the world. On Colbert, for instance, the three musicians played a version of “In His Arms” that sounded slicker than the one on the album. Last night, the country-centric cable network CMT held its annual awards show, and Lambert, Ingram, and Randall again performed together. This time, they sang “Tequila Does,” a drinking song that actually first appeared on Lambert’s 2019 album Wildcard. (It was a big live favorite the last time she got to really tour.) Lambert, Ingram, and Randall wrote “Tequila Does” together, and they reworked it for the Marfa Tapes album. That acoustic version was the one that they played at the CMT Awards.

That CMT Awards performance took place around what looked like a real campfire — though, because of the extremely-pro lighting, it also looked a bit like a fake film-set version of a campfire. Here’s that performance:

The CMT Awards also featured a big superstar team-up. H.E.R., who is not a country singer but who seems to be on a sacred mission to show up at every awards show this year, sang a duet with country superstar Chris Stapleton. Together, they sang H.E.R.’s “Hold On,” and they both honestly crushed it. The song gave both H.E.R. and Stapleton a chance to bust out some serious vocal theatrics and to get into a guitar-solo duel. Their voices shouldn’t make sense together, but they somehow mesh beautifully. They played it in front of the awards-show audience, and that audience lost its shit. It’s honestly a great performance, a real showstopper. Watch it below:

The Marfa Tapes is out now on Vanner Records.