wanted to let her music do the talking. The country crooner was noticeably quiet following her 2015 split from  (and the subsequent release of her album one year later), but now Lambert is admitting her ex moving on with  was one of the reasons behind her silence.

“We had another bomb when I told [Sony Music Nashville chief Randy Goodman] I wasn’t going to talk to anyone. And I didn’t,” Lambert, 34, said during an interview with published on Tuesday, July 3, referring to the release of her 2016 record. “I came into [manager Marion Kraft]’s office and said, ‘I’m not speaking to anyone until they hear this record.’ That’s fair. I thought that was fair …  It was going to be hell, and I’d already been through hell.”

“It was hell putting it on paper, putting my words on paper. So I didn’t want to rehash,” she continued about doing press. “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 … 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.”

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

“I think lots of people expected a revenge vibe,” she added. “I’ve heard that a couple of times, but really, this is opposite of that … I didn’t even know really what all it was gonna take to come out of it, but I was gonna feel it. And I was gonna come out alive. Hungover a lot, maybe, but I was gonna get through it. Alive and feeling like death, but it was OK. It was true.”