Miranda Lambert and Brendan McLoughlin have been married for nearly seven years now, and she says he’s totally embraced her rural Southern lifestyle.

That didn’t happen overnight. After all, McLoughlin’s a New York City native and a former NYPD police officer. Going from the big city to life on a farm in Tennessee or Texas is a pretty big change.

But McLoughlin has adapted.

“He retired after eight years, because I drug him down to Tennessee and now Texas,” she jokes on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “And now he says y’all.”

That’s right: McLoughlin has adopted the definitive Southern expression!

But Lambert says that’s not the only change she’s seen in her husband since he moved South. She’s also noticed that he’s finally learning to live a little slower.

“We literally just talked about it yesterday. [I said], ‘You are finally at a regulated nervous system level,'” Lambert recounts. “I think he was just used to…You have to vibrate at a different energy [in New York City], especially if you’re a police officer.”

“We have a farm in Tennessee, and we were there for a couple of days this week, just chilling, making cookies, being normal,” she continued. “He’s finally, like, enjoying that.”

When Did Miranda Lambert + Brendan McLoughlin Get Married?

Lambert and McLoughlin met in 2018 when she was in New York City promoting a new album with her group the Pistol Annies. He was working security during her stop on Good Morning America.

They kept their relationship totally private, and in February 2020, Lambert shocked the country world by announcing that they were married. At the time, he was still a mystery man to her fan base.

Read More: The Happiest Marriages in Country Music

In some ways, Lambert and McLoughlin make a surprising pair, since they come from such different parts of the country.

But Lambert points out that they grew up with some big similarities, too, like the fact that they were both raised in families closely associated with law enforcement.

Plus, they’ve embraced each other’s hobbies and even started some new ones together.

What Do Miranda Lambert + Brendan McLoughlin Do During Their ‘Us Time’?

Elsewhere in the podcast episode, Lambert says she taught McLoughlin to shoot bows during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

She picked up golfing, in part as a way to spend more quality time with him. Lambert even wound up participating in this year’s Ryder Cup celebrity golf match.

Read More: Miranda Lambert and Brendan McLoughlin Have the Cutest ‘Us Time’ Hobby

Lambert and McLoughlin also make a point to travel internationally when she’s not busy touring or in the studio. During her conversation with Joe Rogan, Lambert said that McLoughlin helps her carve out more time away from work.

“I’ll go and say, ‘They’re working me to death.’ They is me. I’m the one adding s–t to the calendar,” she jokes.

“My husband’s like, ‘You said you were gonna be off this week,’…so I really am making the priority to take some winter months, because we start touring in the spring and don’t stop ’til the winter again. So I feel like it’s important.”