Kacey Musgraves has traveled far and wide across her 14-year career. She shook up Nashville’s conservative values with her 2013 debut, Same Trailer Different Park, and became Music City’s millennial provocateur. She has soared into the cosmos in search of “galactic country,” and reached further into the pop sphere on 2021’s synth-y Star-Crossed. On her last project, the singer came back down to Earth at last with the folky ruminations of Deeper Well.
Now, on her seventh studio album, Middle of Nowhere, Musgraves is letting the wind take her all the way back home, to a place where there’s no cell service, bulls roam freely, and gorgeous pedal steel guitars are plentiful. Musgraves’ chameleon soul is clearly her superpower, as none of those new terrains have ever felt wholly out of place for her. But it makes sense that this is where the dime-store cowgirl sounds most self-assured.
The title track sums up Musgraves’ state of mind. “Middle of Nowhere” doesn’t just refer to a literal remote locale, it’s also about the liminal chapter of her life, one where “There’s no reckless men/Who don’t know what they want.” Musgraves finds herself in small-town Texas with her arms wide open, “trying to lean in to the in-between” of late-thirties singledom without shying away from the ghosts of shitty exes past who haunt her across these songs. Ever the sassy songwriter, Musgraves handles these specters like a pro with witty write-offs. “I don’t have to act like I like all your friends, or your mama,” she deadpans on the breezy, banjo-inflected “Loneliest Girl.”
Musgraves’ hard-won homecoming marks her best full-length release since 2018’s Golden Hour, which went on to win an Album of the Year Grammy. The albums she’s made in the intervening years were necessary swerves on the way to Middle of Nowhere. On her new album, though, this once-and-future country queen leans back into the twangier sounds of her earliest releases to bring the spirit of her home state into focus.
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It wouldn’t be a true return to her roots if Musgraves didn’t call on some of country music’s best players, like Willie Nelson and Billy Strings, to jump on tracks like “Uncertain, TX” and “Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy.” Most notably, Miranda Lambert lends her own Texas drawl to the beef-squashing “Horses and Divorces.” (Fans know there’s been some rumored resentment ever since Lambert’s 2013 hit “Mama’s Broken Heart,” which Musgraves originally penned for her first LP, and reluctantly gave up.) It’s supremely Texan and quite great to hear the two go bar for bar over a waltzing accordion until they can quip that all of their drama is “whiskey under the bridge.”
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In order to wholeheartedly honor Texas and its borderland history, Musgraves taps into another genre that has long been in conversation with country music: música mexicana. The singer has long celebrated Mexican culture and even hopped on a song by Mexican-American pop singer Cuco in 2022; last year, she collaborated with Carín León, one of the most prominent voices in música mexicana. In interviews, she’s talked about how she grew up listening to Mexican and country sounds mingling, and you can hear that influence distinctly on the LP, from the norteño accordion and upright bass to the ranchera cowbell and bolero congas.
By the end of the album, Musgraves’ homecoming has turned into a honky-tonk celebration as she relishes in the fun of weaving more Mexican touches into her music, talking her shit with Lambert, and even getting lucky on the sultry “Mexico Honey.” At first, it seems like a missed opportunity when she wraps Middle of Nowhere with the aching ballad “Hell on Me” rather than “Rhinestoned,” a sparkly number about toking up “until the heartache and the sadness is gone.” But that heartache hasn’t quite subsided — and “Hell on Me” shows she wants to be real about that. On quite possibly her most devastating song to date, Musgraves details the darker side of loneliness over sparse guitar in true country singer-songwriter tradition. It goes to show, there’s nothing quite like coming home to keep you honest.
