Roots rebel a roaring success
Kacey Musgraves has turned heads inside and outside Nashville with Golden Hour album, reaching far beyond traditional country circles
One couldn’t take a step in any direction as the New Year approached without tripping over yet another music critic who’d anointed Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour as one of the finest albums of 2018.
The Golden, Tex. native’s third major-label album — fourth if you count 2016’s A Very Kasey Christmas — wound up rated the fourth-best reviewed album of the year on the review-aggregate site Metacritic, firmly establishing her as a country artist whose reach extends far beyond typical country circles. Indeed, a lot of Golden Hour’s critical accolades came from blogs and underground-attuned publications such as Pitchfork, Exclaim!, Stereogum and Consequence of Sound that would never look twice at, say, a Luke Bryan record.
Even when Musgraves won Album of the Year over Chris Stapleton, Keith Urban, Dierks Bentley and Thomas Rhett at the Country Music Association Awards this past November, the result was viewed with mild surprise, prompting a series of essays about why her victory was “a big deal” and a sign that, perhaps, the Nashville establishment was finally coming around to one of the genre’s brightest young stars. As far as country music is concerned, she’s still an outsider.
“First of all, I make the music because it makes me feel good and it’s something that I would want to hear and anything outside of that is f--in’ awesome,” offers Musgraves, 30, as chipper and charming and candid as it gets despite being deep in her final day of rehearsals before the Golden Hour tour kickoff in Indianapolis earlier this week. “So whatever the route that it gets to people, it doesn’t really matter to me. I just want music lovers, people who love music and love songs and want to listen to the lyrics. I feel like whenever you come to one of my shows, it’s people all over the map — old, young, black, white, gay, straight, whatever — and it’s really cool to see.”
The lyrics, of course, are one of the reasons conservative Nashville has been a little frightened of Musgraves.
Amidst the quick-witted small-town sketches featured on 2013’s Same Trailer, Different Park were scattered references to smokin’ weed and how being gay is OK, for instance, while 2015’s Pageant Material upped the ante by unapologetically offering up an entire number about the inherent sexism of the country-music industry
titled “Good Ol’ Boys Club.” “If I end up goin’ down in flames,” she sang, “Well, at least I know I did it my own way.”
On Golden Hour, which features a song about her mother written during the throes of a “mild” LSD trip, Musgraves continues to do it her own way. This time, she melds her more traditionalist country impulses with subtle electronic influences — she tried to imagine in part, she says, “what it would sound like if Daft Punk made a country record” — and a healthy dose of Rumours- era Fleetwood Mac for a record that shimmers universally in the way the great pop records of the 1970s did.
The electronic influences are a tad overstated, but there’s definitely some Vocoder in the mix alongside the banjo and pedal-steel guitar here and there, and tunes like “Velvet Elvis” and “High Horse” appropriate languid Bee Gees disco the way Feist did on Let It Die. The latter track could even slot into a creative house-music DJ set, although its vibe is definitely more in line with ELO’s Discovery era than EDM.
“It’s funny because you won’t find a bigger traditionalist than me, in the sense that I grew up singing traditional country-and-western music — like, literally wearing fringe, rhinestones and a cowboy hat,” says a laughing Musgraves. “From the age of 8, I was yodelling and I was singing these ancient country-music songs. So I can’t escape it. It’s in my blood, and I grew up studying all these songs that came way before me. So, I mean, I have a giant affinity for it. But I also don’t want that to limit me, y’know? There’s always going to be traditionalists in every genre who say ‘Don’t f--k with this formula. It needs to stay exactly how it is.’ And that’s whether it’s punk or country or whatever.
“But the beauty of it is you can do whatever you want: it’s music. And sometimes, yeah, the corporate mindset and the industry protocol, especially in the country world, can be so limiting and so damaging to the process of figuring that out. I was just adamant from Day 1 that it was never going to be that way because, for me, I’d just rather have less fans, who know exactly what I’m about, than have mass reach with a watered-down version of what I’d really like to do. I think that sounds like hell. I’m really proud of my songs and I’ve never considered selling out for more radio play or more attention.”
Musgraves has sold out the Danforth Music Hall this Friday and it’s a safe bet that she will be returning before long to play a larger venue.
Golden Hour, which debuted at No. 4 on the U.S. Billboard album chart and No. 11 on its Canadian equivalent, has all the makings of a proper crossover hit and, to borrow the title of its opening track, a “Slow Burn.” It’s now nominated for Album of the Year alongside the likes of Drake’s Scorpion and Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy at next month’s Grammy Awards, and stands a very good chance of winning. She’ll also compete for Country Album of the Year, Country Song of the Year for “Space Cowboy” and Country Solo Performance of the Year for “Butterflies,” a giddy ode to her new husband Ruston Kelly. Win or lose, Musgraves’s mainstream visibility has never been higher.
“Most times when you look at history, aside from some anomalies, it takes cool music or music that doesn’t fit into a certain box the longer way to find people,” she says.
“But then, hopefully, it’ll be around longer. When I look at people like Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson or anybody who we consider icons now — especially in country music — at one point they were really pushing boundaries and pissing people off and being banned from radio stations or getting run out of Nashville or leaving Nashville and being, like, ‘F--k you!’