The Lone-Star Laments of Kacey Musgraves
Everyone knows there’s something kind of funny about country music. The genre’s cultural identity is linked to a stylized and unapologetically old-fashioned vision of America, which can seem rather hokey. In 1975, the legendary country singer and songwriter David Allan Coe released his version of “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” a sardonic tribute to the genre that he loved. After the second refrain, Coe added a spoken interlude in which he recounts a conversation with Steve Goodman, one of the songwriters. (The other was John Prine, uncredited.) “He told me it was the perfect country-and-Western song,” Coe says, about Goodman. “I told him it was not the perfect country-and-Western song, because he hadn’t said anything at all about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk.” Apparently, Goodman agreed, because the final verse efficiently makes up for these omissions:
This was the kind of country satire that country fans could enjoy, and evidently they did, because it became Coe’s first Top Ten country hit. Coe died last week, at the age of eighty-six, leaving behind a vast and varied discography. He is probably best known for his song “Take This Job and Shove It,” which was a No. 1 country hit for Johnny Paycheck. But Coe’s handful of hits were balanced by political songs, provocations (his lyrics included both sexual and racial epithets), and more than a few punch lines. “If that ain’t country, it’s a damn good joke,” he once sang, but his career was proof that a memorable song can easily be both.
Perhaps Coe would have enjoyed “Dry Spell,” an absurd song by Kacey Musgraves, which is full of double entendres about unwanted abstinence. “Ain’t nobody’s tool up in my shed / Ain’t nobody’s boots under my bed,” she sings, as if she is hoping but not expecting that things will change. (In an old Coe song called “Coffee,” he brags, “I’m the only male in her box.”) “Dry Spell” comes near the beginning of “Middle of Nowhere,” Musgraves’s new album, which is doubly conceptual, cleverly evoking two classic country themes at the same time. The album is full of songs about Musgraves’s state of birth, which is Texas, and her state of mind, which seems to be lonely. “Don’t tell me you miss me, I don’t care / I’m somewhere in the middle of nowhere,” she sighs, as if she’s decided that it’s not the worst place to be. And “Uncertain, TX,” a duet with Coe’s old friend and sometime collaborator Willie Nelson, depicts an imaginary small town full of romantic disappointment, as personified by “cowboys that just can’t get off the fence.”
Musgraves has spent her career honing her own kind of tongue-in-cheek country music, deploying self-consciously old-fashioned references and sounds with a winsome wink. “Same Trailer Different Park,” the 2013 album that marked her major-label début, included a love song that made reference to Kampgrounds of America, the company that has been giving recreational vehicles a place to park since 1962. (“Any K.O.A. is A-O.K., as long as I’m with you,” she sings.) “Golden Hour,” her 2018 album, was less flippant but even more appealing: a beautiful and warmhearted collection, gently influenced by disco, that evoked the slightly disorienting feeling of being lost in love. What happened next seemed to violate some fundamental law of the pop-musical universe: in 2020, Musgraves announced that she and her husband, the singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, were divorcing, and yet neither of the two bittersweet albums that followed, “Star-Crossed” (2021) and “Deeper Well” (2024), was nearly as memorable as the marital-bliss masterpiece that had come before. Evidently, breakups do not always make for the best music.
Perhaps the issue was a different breakup: Musgraves’s growing estrangement from country music itself. Despite her rising popularity—her 2024 tour ended with two nights at the Bridgestone Arena, in Nashville—Musgraves hasn’t had much success on country radio. In the years after “Golden Hour,” she moved further away from the genre, and that had the paradoxical effect of deëmphasizing her individuality: in the broader, more formless, less tradition-obsessed world of singer-songwriters, she sounded freer but less singular. In recent years, she has doubled back somewhat. She sang on “I Remember Everything,” by the country-adjacent singer Zach Bryan, which became her biggest hit. (The song went to No. 1 on the pop chart; on Spotify, it has about as many streams as all thirteen songs from “Golden Hour” combined.) And throughout “Middle of Nowhere,” Musgraves seems to enjoy once more having a set of musical conventions to play around with. “Horses and Divorces” is a lighthearted collaboration with Miranda Lambert, a Texas country trailblazer who has, for more than twenty years, been finding ways to tweak the genre’s clichés. The two had previously been rumored to have been in a quiet feud, possibly linked to Lambert’s hugely popular recording of “Mama’s Broken Heart,” a song co-written by Musgraves. But now they’re trading verses about all the things they have in common: “We’re both from Texas / And we both love Willie / But, I mean, really / What asshole doesn’t like Willie?” They’re accompanied by an accordion that evokes norteño music—just as the Nelson collaboration, “Uncertain, TX,” saunters along on a shuffling rhythm that suggests the influence of cumbia, a style with roots in Colombia that became popular in Mexico. This seems to be part of what Musgraves has discovered: “traditional” need not mean “predictable.”
As it happens, the biggest Texas country song of the moment comes not from Musgraves’s new album but from Ella Langley, an Alabaman who has lately emerged as a breakout star. Last summer, during a show at Pier 17, overlooking the East River, Langley played the part of the humble upstart. “Thank you for showing up early tonight,” she said, because she was the opening act, supporting Riley Green, a hunky baritone hitmaker with a knack for wistful, well-made songs that lodge themselves on country-radio playlists. (Fans have theorized that the two used to date, but the singers have never confirmed it. At Pier 17, they sang a few songs together, but kept their interactions professional—suspiciously so, perhaps.) Late last year, Langley released “Choosin’ Texas,” a proudly traditional country song about a woman whose man is dancing with someone else: “She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way he’s two-steppin’ ’round the room / And judgin’ by the smile that’s written on his face, there’s nothin’ I can do.” Nashville is a miraculous place, turning out dozens of gemlike songs such as this one every year, and yet something about “Choosin’ Texas” captured people’s imagination, and it became not just a country favorite but one of the year’s biggest hits, in any genre; it is currently at No. 1 on the pop chart for the eighth week.
Langley is not the kind of country singer who bristles at the genre’s conventions. Her new album, “Dandelion,” includes plenty of country love songs that seem happy to satisfy Coe’s checklist, or at least the updated version of it—less prison, more pets. One of them begins with an exquisitely crafted country couplet: “Your boots by the bed, my head on your shoulder / I’m thinking it’s love, and I’m thinking it sober.” And yet “Dandelion” is not exactly what fans of “Choosin’ Texas” may have been expecting. It begins with “Froggy Went a Courtin’,” a snippet of a folk song that long predates country music, and, in fact, long predates America. (Historians trace it to sixteenth-century Scotland.) But elsewhere the dominant influence seems to be seventies soft rock. “Be Her” leans heavily on a simple statement of romantic frustration (“I just wanna be her”), and leans heavily, too, on a major-seventh chord that may put some listeners in mind of breezy old bands like America and Bread. Sometimes the effect is rather sleepy, and Langley’s reverent version of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” the 1952 Kitty Wells hit, is much less fun than her encounter with a different country icon: Lambert, who shows up to help Langley sing an appropriately lightweight song called “Butterfly Season.” Like many country albums, this one is partly about the gap between the life Langley currently leads, as a famous singer touring arenas (as the headliner) and stadiums (opening for Morgan Wallen), and the life she remembers, or imagines: “House on a hill, a horse in the yard / A dog at my feet, just a-pickin’ my guitar.” It sounds like a delightful fantasy—and, for that matter, a pretty impressive dog. ♦