At her mainstage Coachella performance in 2019, Kacey Musgraves led the audience in a chant between songs: “When I say YEE, you say HAW.” When she stayed silent for a beat and the crowd shouted “HAW” anyway, she chided them: “I didn’t say fuckin’ yee.” There’s a lesson here, which is that Kacey Musgraves works on her own time, regardless of our expectations or demands. And with her new album, Middle of Nowhere, she has decided to ride in on her high horse and settle back into some down-the-middle country. Folks, she’s finally said fuckin’ yee.
To describe Middle of Nowhere with a rustic cliché, Musgraves is going back to her roots. Our introduction was the single “Dry Spell,” a sultry, funny, and pristinely constructed song about not having had sex in 335 days. “Lonely with a capital H, if you know what I mean,” Musgraves coos, “I’ve been sitting on the washing machine.” This isn’t the Kacey of 2024’s Deeper Well, omm-ing her way through pain, blaming any errant troubles on the astrological climate. Middle of Nowhere’s Kacey is witty, a bit sarcastic, alternately ecstatic and frustrated but always ready to entertain.
Her 2018 masterpiece, Golden Hour, swerved gracefully between country and pop. Middle of Nowhere, on the other hand, is an expansive but focused survey of the past 50-plus years of country music and its various subgenres, with a particular emphasis on her Texas heritage. Musgraves tapped longtime collaborators like Josh Osborne, Luke Laird, and Shane McAnally (the latter two co-wrote her Grammy-winning song “Space Cowboy”) to write her most classically country tunes since 2015’s Pageant Material: There are four different pedal steel players credited on Middle of Nowhere, and they all get a workout on this album.
Musgraves sounds confident and comfortable. “Back on the Wagon” is a Garth Brooks-style yarn about loving a loser who’s definitely, absolutely getting his shit together this time, whose chorus rhymes “wagon” (he’s back on it) with “drag him” (don’t do it). “Abilene,” about a woman who blows off the titular city for greener pastures, is a spiritual sequel to 2013’s “Blowin’ Smoke,” which depicted a gaggle of small-town waitresses who imagined better lives but never made any changes. And “Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy” could be read as a dismissal of superficial converts to the agrarian aesthetic (“I bet most of these boots are probably never seeing any dirt/And the ground ain’t any softer if you’re wearing a rhinestone shirt,” Musgraves scoffs), but it ends up being a lament for the kind of people who seek freedom but can’t handle commitment.
It’s a feature-heavy album: “Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy” gets an assist from bluegrass phenom Billy Strings, and Miranda Lambert joins the party for a ribald, norteño-infused waltz called “Horses and Divorces.” The two Texans appear to be burying the hatchet after years of rumored discord, which apparently began when Lambert poached the Musgraves-written “Mama’s Broken Heart.” On “Horses and Divorces,” the two wave away their feud as “whiskey under the bridge” and find some common ground: They both keep farm animals, they’ve both had marriages end, and, simply, “We both like to drink.” And they both love Willie Nelson, of course—“What asshole doesn’t like Willie?” they warble together like they’re sharing a mic at a Nashville karaoke bar.
Neatly, Willie himself shows up on the next track to croon on “Uncertain, TX,” a Tex-Mex number about indecisive lovers with quite a lot of cowbell sitting high in the mix. Uncertainty, ambivalence, confusion, and delusion—the musical statements on Middle of Nowhere are confident and cohesive, but Musgrave’s lyrical point of view seems to blow hither and yon from song to song. She’s said this album was written during the longest period of singlehood in her life, when she was obsessed with the concept of “transitional, empty spaces,” and you can feel her perception waver like the air on the horizon on a hot day. On “Mexico Honey,” she’s kindling a new crush whose intensity has her at a loss for words (“I mean for real…what the hell?”), eventually melting into a hazy bridge that’s all Lana Del Rey yearning; on the title track, whose shared harmonies with Daniel Tashian (another frequent collaborator) feel as cozy as a campfire, she’s leaving everything and everyone behind without a second thought.
At full power, the ringing of Musgraves’ soprano can penetrate your heart, but she spends most of the album singing in a lower register that makes her sound a little dejected—like on “I Believe In Ghosts,” a nuanced return to her taste for ’70s rock, and closer “Hell on Me,” an acoustic epitaph for a failed relationship. It’s an interesting shift from Deeper Well, where Musgraves sang in airy, translucent tones about recharging and healing. Middle of Nowhere is a couple years past that emotional excision, and perhaps a little more pragmatic. Where she once lamented the state of being wealthy and isolated on “Lonely Millionaire,” now on “Loneliest Girl,” she’s “getting better at being alone.” Diving into solitude means she doesn’t have to pretend to like your mama, or deal with your childhood trauma—though her hushed delivery gives off an air of resignation, rather than glee.
And no wonder she’s fine with being so lonely. The men on this album are, to put it plainly, weenies. On “Middle of Nowhere,” she distances herself from “reckless men who don’t know what they want.” On the haunting “Coyote,” a duet with Gregory Alan Isakov, the former object of her affection hides in the shadows, seeking “pretty things that can’t be held,” and on “Uncertain, TX,” Musgraves complains about “cowboys that just won’t get off the fence.” Whither the man who actually wishes to park their truck in her drive and stay awhile? Anyhow, there’s no need to wallow—album highlight “Rhinestoned” offers a corrective for misery so signature that it could be described as Musgravian: When you’re feeling as foolish as a rodeo clown, it’s time to smoke a little weed and go dancing. On Deeper Well, she ditched her daily gravity bong habit, but now she’s “got something in her pocket” that can help her and a heartbroken comrade “put a little sparkle on.” Feckless gauchos be damned: ”Rhinestoned,” with its gentle tone, delicate backing vocals, and classic country wordplay, shows that being in between things is a beautiful place to spend a little time.
