KACEY MUSGRAVES – MIDDLE OF NOWHERE: REVIEW
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KACEY MUSGRAVES
Middle Of Nowhere (Lost Highway)
GOLDEN AND GOLDEN HOUR? The synchronicity was not just in the titles and it was hard to miss.
A few years ago, Kylie Minogue, not someone who had ever been described as anything but a pop artist, allegedly made a country record – she hadn’t, Gold was just a great pop record that picked up a few Nashville touches, but marketing is marketing - and silly pop media lapped it up more than country radio or fans did. At the same time, Kacey Musgraves, who was legitimately a country artist – though already being frozen out by the industry’s power centres because she wouldn’t play the misogynistic marketing game – made an album, Golden Hour, even more pop than Minogue’s, confusing a few and alienating a few more.
Ships passing in the night, heading in opposite directions? You might have thought so given the way country music has grudgingly embraced dabblers-in-country going back to the likes of Olivia Newton-John and John Denver in the early ‘70s and more recently Lil Nas X, as long as they sold, while pop quickly pretends nothing existed beforehand if you can sell like a Taylor Swift.
While Minogue soon went back to more familiar sounds and marketing campaigns and one of the biggest hits of her career in Padam Padam (a song so ordinary they had to name it twice to get me to care), Musgraves made another synthy/wordy/dance-y pop record in Star-Crossed and would have been well advised to take her hat, spurs and double denim and head over to more welcoming, if not necessarily more lucrative, pastures like The (formerly Dixie) Chicks had. No one would have blamed her.
But no. Middle Of Nowhere is, more than its pained, folkish predecessor, Deeper Well, a country record. Happily so. And excellently so it has to be said.
Not one laden with fiddle/banjo tropes, not singing about hard living men leaving hard done by women in a pickup (then getting pissed), but rooted in pointed storytelling, really crafted songs, a splash or five of pedal steel, a visit from Willie Nelson and … yes, getting pissed.
The latter is done with Miranda Lambert – whose safer country/pop has always kept the country prominent enough – in the none-more-country titled, southern border sounds-squeezing, Willie-referencing waltz, Horses And Divorces. Seemingly setting aside past differences over a shared interest in whiskey, cowboys and missteps with both, the two Texans declare that “there’s always two sides of the truth” (echoing another feud-ending song, Shame, by not-at-all-country Brits, Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow) and now, deep in the drink, “maybe we’re more alike than we think”.
Neatly enough, Nelson turns up in the next song, set in love’s “great state of confusion”, Uncertain, TX. He’s not called on to do more than add a relaxed – of course – under-voice in the second half of the song, but it’s enough to round out the light and danceable pleasures.
Speaking of pleasures, there’s nowhere near enough of them for Musgraves as she explains in the early single, the heel-toe twang-step Dry Spell, a song about what you may resort to when company is not readily available – in this case for a precise 335 days, “and the last time, it wasn’t good anyway”. With no one’s boots under her bed, no late-night calls “for a real good time”, plenty of bacon but “no one to bring it home to”, she’s, well … “I’ve been sitting on the washing machine”.
Indeed, the absence of a decent chap is oft-mentioned by the now long-divorced singer, whether they are prevaricating (Uncertain, TX), promising change and being believed when she should know better (Back On The Wagon), lost in vast shadows of what used to be (the powerfully spacious Coyote, dueting with Gregory Alan Isakov) or maybe not being missed at all if their presence means being a replacement mother to the man-child (Loneliest Girl). Dudes are sleeping on this bounty it seems.
Not that twice-bitten, thrice-shy Musgraves has abandoned the moves as she displays in the sparkling sly shuffle of Rhinestoned (a song that might have been eagerly taken by ONJ back in her Banks Of The Ohio days if no one noticed the drug pun) where she explains to a potential drought breaker that their mutual broken hearts might be alleviated by lighting up a little mood changer she’s got in her pocket and, later, “a couple of bodies getting lost and found”.
While company at home might be lacking, Musgraves isn’t lacking for it on the record. Along with the aforementioned contributors, there are old friend co-writers such as Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, and the multi-talented neo-bluegrasser Billy Strings subtly fills string-instrument and vocal spaces in Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy.
The subtle bit is important: Strings isn’t exactly playing second fiddle to his hostess but he, like the other guests, works to enhance. This is very much a Kacey Musgraves album. A Kacey Musgraves country album. Which is golden enough.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Kacey Musgraves – Middle Of Nowhere