I first saw country singer songwriter Kacey Musgraves perform at the Arts Club on Dover Street back in 2013 for the launch of her first major-label album, Same Trailer Different Park, which won her the first of her eight Grammies, and she was a great performer and an even more striking songwriter – witty, concise, memorable, with great turns of phrase and a great clarity in her storytelling and characters. She was/is a superior version of the uber-megastar that is/was Taylor Swift.
She’s funnier and filthier than Taylor; I can’t see gazillions of preteens bawling out her lyrics without suddenly pausing for thought, feeling confused and alone and heading for the nearest dive bar to feel close to the fallen angels of their true nature.
The album title comes from a sign in her East Texas home town of Golden: “Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere”. It posits the singer and her album doppelgänger as bereft of lovers, relationships, places to share; she’s nowhere, and not even getting there fast. Hell, aren’t we all at times? Such post-break up thoughts led her to pen the title track, and then those kind of thoughts and feelings threaded through the rest of the 13 songs that make up this excellent, absorbing, entertaining, truly witty and serious album.
Lead single, the sprightly, foot-tapping, “Dry Spell” has more double entendres than a month of dirty weekends down at Hooters. It’s funny and impactful and hungry at the mouth. “It’s been a reaaal long 365 days...”. Must feel like a month of Sundays. The following “Back on the Wagon” is a hopeful tale, if perhaps naïvely hopeful, in its narrative of a quietly desperate woman corralling her man into a good place after he’s just stopped doing what he always does. Further in, the accordion-soaked “Uncertain, TX (Willie Nelson)” is lovely, with some softly spoken co-vocals from Texas’s greatest living deity. Fellow Texan Miranda Lambert joins her on the very funny “Horse and Divorces”, and throughout, her lean, taut band delivers every time, right down to the stark leave-taking ballad “Hell on Me” that seals the set. Looks like there’s a lot to be said for spending time in the middle of nowhere.
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