We Got the Old Kacey Back

Kacey Musgraves’s twisting catalogue cruises through country, folk, pop, soul, and disco in search of multifaceted frugality. All of the singer-songwriter’s music reflects beautifully on letting go. Her 2013 breakthrough single, “Follow Your Arrow,” beckoned fans to freedom from any hang-ups over weed and same-sex attraction; it met critical acclaim and controversy for a patina of hippie defiance like the work of her Texan predecessor Willie Nelson. “Late to the Party,” from 2016’s Pageant Material, rejected the concept of FOMO, suggesting there’s nothing to miss out on if you’re with a lover. 2018’s Golden Hour pulled away from in-demand country collaborators Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, who co-wrote and produced “Follow Your Arrow,” in favor of exquisite psychedelic exploration. It earned a Grammy for Album of the Year. But the more pop-oriented, sci-fi tinged 2021 visual album Star-crossed, which chronicled her divorce, sought less fulfillment in romance and country music. That one resulted in the public insult of her disqualification from the Best Country Album category at the 2022 Grammys. By 2024’s mostly well received Deeper Well, she retreated into stately, if clinical, acoustic musings that touch on another relationship’s end; on the maudlin highlight “Lonely Millionaire,” she explained that it’s no use committing fully to a pursuit of wealth, which you can’t “talk to in your king-size bed.”

Now, Musgraves is releasing herself from the musical wanderlust that made her such a crossover star and a mercurial writer. Her seventh album, Middle of Nowhere, is a subtle redirection, a sequel to the stories about growing up in Texas that populated her 2010s work. Laird and McAnally are back in the picture, joining Golden Hour, Star-crossed, and Deeper Well collaborators Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian as co-writers. The former pair tempers the latter’s lush sonic detours, making it so the new album lives and dies by the pen. The libidinous lead single, “Dry Spell,” all howling blue guitar notes and not-so-thinly-veiled dick jokes, rewards their effort with the artist’s first solo country-airplay chart hit of the decade. But it’s only the start of the album’s journey. Here, she revisits the lyrical and geographical fixations of early cuts like 2015’s “Dime Store Cowgirl” — “It don’t matter where I’m going / I’ll still call my hometown home” — showcasing both growth and exhaustion. Her latest breakup album contains sharper writing and juicier arrangements than Deeper Well’s. And if you thought Star-crossed traveled too far off her psychedelic Americana script, you might consider this a long-awaited consultation with the old Kacey.

On the surface, Middle of Nowhere outlines the turmoil before and after an ex’s disappearing act. In July, “Back on the Wagon” laments, her man was plastered and burning money, and by the gutting October of “I Believe in Ghosts,” he was a scent on a sweater to cry on. Other songs like “Coyote” and “Hell on Me” hash out the hard feelings that smolder in a significant other’s absence. But the album is really about releasing yearning and resentment. Musgraves is lighting her reservations on fire like the joint in her pocket in the sultry country-disco jam “Rhinestoned.” There, she picks a guy up at a bar so they “don’t have to be alone.” But the gem referenced in the title is a wink. It’s not just a pothead tribute to Kenny Rogers’s and Dolly Parton’s ’70s and ’80s output but also a suggestion that Musgraves doesn’t care if a fling is a brittler version of a more substantive bond. Everything that glitters glitters; she’d like “a little sparkle.” She’s “not overthinking anything, just feeling all right.” As much as “Rhinestoned” and “Dry Spell” are about trying to get laid, that urge comes and goes.

Musgraves’s core concern on Middle of Nowhere is reaching a place of self-sufficiency and contentment untangled from the worry of navigating others’ bad moods. The album’s emotional centerpiece, “Loneliest Girl,” feels like a bookend to her 2010s highlights “Late to the Party” and “Lonely Weekend,” which derived happiness from being a secluded couple (and agony from temporary separation). Now she thinks it’s risky to tie all that joy up in others. Musgraves would “rather be the loneliest girl in the world” than keep a mate around just to fend off solitude. She’s circling back to an idea she has toyed with in the past. “Lonely Weekend” climbed to a hushed bridge that declared “it’s all right to be alone sometimes,” though the song couldn’t wait for the end of a few days away from a love interest. “Loneliest Girl” and “Hell on Me” (“I tried to be your angel, but you made it hell on me”) distance themselves from the writer’s prior eager-to-please, often-in-love incarnation. “Abilene” tells the story of a woman who leaves her mate from the perspective of the people in town who gossip about her motivations, which you could read into being about Musgraves’s own feelings on going through breakups in the spotlight. A couple albums ago, that song would have been about the reasons he sucks, but she now makes it an interrogation of the protagonist’s right to mystery.

Revisiting the past through a more mature outlook is a recurring theme. The album ties another loose career thread in a duet with Miranda Lambert, the East Texas singer who ignited a long-simmering feud with Musgraves when she recorded “Mama’s Broken Heart” for her 2011 album, Four the Record; Musgraves, a friend and a writer on the come-up at the time, had written it as the lead single for her debut album. “Horses and Divorces” reunites the duo to commiserate over loving whiskey and Willie Nelson. The legend himself then appears on the whimsically forlorn “Uncertain, TX” years after Musgraves’s giddy nod in “Dime Store Cowgirl”: “I’ve had my picture made with Willie Nelson.” These collaborations and the balance of personnel from pop and country frame Middle of Nowhere as less of a homecoming than a holistic creative reunification. What Musgraves is doing here is not like the bro-country guys who ease off trap drums to appease country traditionalists. She is just recuperating, focusing on weed, journaling, sporadic carnality, and the wealth of permutations of Texas country and folkloric music.

The influence of regional Mexican folk styles like norteño, whose lively ensembles have blended Latin American and European instrumentation for over a century, peppers songs like “Uncertain” and “Mexico Honey.” There’s a strong statement that Musgraves, who’s often nagged for her liberal politics and evolving sound, is a student of South-by-Southwest cultural traditions: Accordion notes drizzle into sad country songs that salute a musical dialogue between residents of Mexico and the American states annexed off it. “The truth is Texas would not be Texas without Mexico in many ways,” Musgraves told NPR in March. In May, she invited the family band the Mariachi Brothers to open for her at New Braunfels’s storied Gruene Hall after their release in March from ICE detention. By hammering on the shared experiences that flow across borders, this album presents a manifestation of the carefree advocacy that jumped out in “Follow Your Arrow.” Middle of Nowhere is a spirited, if depressed, reaffirmation of Musgraves’s foundations. Even reclaiming loneliness as a desirable state feels Texan, like a reminder that the Lone Star symbolizes independence. Musgraves similarly aims to be a republic of one.