Album of the Week: Kacey Musgraves – 'Middle Of Nowhere'
On the first single from her new album, Kacey Musgraves tells it how it is. Or, how she is.
“I'm so lonely, lonely with a capital ‘H’, if you know what I mean,” she sings sweetly but leadingly on the boot-scootin’ country-pop of ‘Dry Spell’. “I've been sitting on the washing machine, ain't nobody's tool up in my shed, ain't nobody's boots under my bed… And I'm tired of keepin' my hands to myself, 911 it's officially a cry for help…”
Toto, we’re not in Nashville. Musgraves may have the prairie-clear voice and Country FM-friendly melodicism – not to mention, in all her new promotional pictures, the cowboy boots and hat – of a stoutly establishment star of America’s biggest musical genre. But on her sixth album, the eight-time Grammy-winner is once more ploughing her own furrow – lyrically at least. The artist who released 2013 LGBT anthem ‘Follow Your Arrow’ (“kiss lots of boys, or kiss lots of girls, if that's something you're into, when the straight and narrow gets a little too straight, roll up a joint, or don't…”) is, true to form, bringing a little personal spice to this most traditionalist of genres.
This, to be fair, has long been the 37-year-old’s saddlebag. During the making of her country-busting third album, Golden Hour, the girl from the no-stop town of Golden, Texas publicly admitted enjoyed “micro-dosing on LSD”.
“That embarrassed the hell out of my mom and grandma,” she told me, cheerfully, in 2018. “But I said, sorry, I have to tell the truth. Psychedelics have been something that I’ve mildly dabbled with… If you’re responsible about it, it can be a positive thing. It’s really opened my heart and mind in a lot of ways.”
She had also recently married musician Rustin Kelly, which made for a certain lovestruck vibe to Golden Hour. But, again, Musgraves wasn’t one for playing it straight. “I don’t want people to be like, ‘we get it, you’re married, you’re in love, boring, snoozeville, song number 13…’”
A lot personally has happened since then. She and Kelly divorced in 2020. Then, until 2023 she was in a relationship with poet Cole Schafer. Hence Middle of Nowhere, a new album “written during a period of reflection and post-breakup clarity”. At its most playful, that’s the horny AF ‘Dry Spell’, and the woozy, boozy, late-night, zydeco-flavoured singalong ‘Horses & Divorces’, a duet with scene queen Miranda Lambert. Most evocatively, it’s the winsome, heart-tugging title track.
But at its most on-the-nose, that means the toe-tapping pedal-steel lament ‘Loneliest Girl’, and ‘Uncertain TX’, a by-the-numbers, clip-clopping, Texas tea-channelling collab that’s elevated, just, by the vocal contributions of the mighty Willie Nelson.
‘Coyote’ – a duet with Colorado-via-South Africa folkie Gregor Alan Isakov – is more intriguing, a spaced-out epic with a windblown torch and twang. But then there’s ‘Rhinestoned’, with its unashamedly easy-listening ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ vibes. It’s a song which typifies the place where this era’s artist has found her happy(ish) place: less middle of nowhere than middle of the road. Here’s hoping that, next time round, the boldly out-there writer whose Insta handle is @spaceykacey either finds love or, as post-Harvest Neil Young famously did, finds that ditch.
