Kacey Musgraves branches out into ‘cosmic country’
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Like athletes who wear the same undershirt or refuse to shave while on a hot streak, musicians also often embrace certain rituals — some pragmatic, some superstitious — in their efforts to deliver a peak performance.
Maverick country singersongwriter Kacey Musgraves is no exception.
While touring through the Midwest on a bill she’s sharing with headliner
Little Big Town and rising country group Midland, Musgraves has been checking in on Facetime two to three times a week with her personal trainer back in Nashville for morning workout sessions.
During a dinner break ahead of a recent set in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she loaded up on grilled squash and green beans to assuage any pangs of guilt over the modest portions of Dr Pepper barbecued ribs and smoked Gouda mac and cheese, which she said, “I just have to sample.”
Bypassing the banana cream pie that beckoned from the catered dessert offerings, she whimpered only briefly.
Just before taking the stage a few minutes later, after emerging from her self-adminstered makeup and hair-quaffing session aboard her tour bus parked behind the US Cellular Center arena, Musgraves gathered members of her band for another nightly ritual: a shot of tequila — a premium Herradura Anejo she brought back from a recent video shoot in Mexico City — slugged from green cactus-shaped shot glasses.
‘Time to change it up’
There’s one place, however, where she adamantly refuses to engage in anything approaching ritualistic inclinations: her songwriting.
“Music isn’t supposed to be a formula — it’s supposed to make you feel something,” said Musgraves, 29, the woman behind such country radio playlist brightening hits as “Follow Your Arrow,” “Merry Go ’Round” and “Mind Your Own Biscuits” as well as the co-writer of Miranda Lambert’s careerboosting single “Mama’s Broken Heart.”
She quickly staked her claim in the progressive wing of country and Americana music by singing about enjoying a toke now and then (“Blowin’ Smoke”), about small-town hopes, dreams and struggles (“Merry Go ’Round”) and about embracing diversity (“Follow Your Arrow”).
On “Golden Hour,” her third studio album (released Friday), Musgraves branches out further, into what she refers to as “cosmic country,” marrying elements of pulsing electronic dance music with traditional genre sounds and instruments while retaining the lyrical freshness that characterized her first two efforts.
Relaxing midafternoon in the comfortable surroundings of the customized tour bus she shares with several of her band members — a few hours before an intense snowstorm blanketed the region in white — Musgraves spoke in no uncertain terms about how she’s determined to follow her own arrow as a musician, whether her impulses immediately connect with fans and radio programmers or not.
“I never want to make the same record twice,” she said. For “Golden
Hour,” that meant, in part, turning to new producers. Although Luke Laird and Shane Mcanally, whom Musgraves collaborated with on her first two albums, contribute to the current work, she primarily focused on working with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian.
“I like that they are very far removed from the typical Music Row, Nashville music mindset,” she said. “I really liked that.
“But I think we all collectively knew it was time to change it up and try out new paths,” she said.
“I feel like it can be easy go get into hindsight and think, ‘Well, people liked the last album, so let’s keep doing that.’ To me, that’s dangerous.”
Different directions
The yearning to mix things up is apparent in spades on “Golden Hour.”
In many ways, it diverges from and expands on the many attributes of her
2013 debut, “Same Trailer, Different Park,” which has logged total equivalent sales of more than 950,000 copies since it was released and earned her Grammy Awards for country album and country song (“Merry Go ’Round”).
Its 2015 successor, “Pageant Material,” which has topped 300,000 equivalent sales, according to Nielsen Music, and collected her another country album Grammy nomination.
Where both of those collections wove genretesting themes into traditional country musical traditions, “Golden Hour” finds Musgraves tapping other influences as source material, from her love of growing up in Golden, Texas, to her adoration of ’80s pop acts such as Madonna and ’70s figures including ABBA, the Bee Gees and Neil Young.
The new “High Horse” is built on driving synthesizer and rhythm loops such as a vintage disco number, while the title track sounds closer to R&B artist Sade than Merle Haggard or Loretta Lynn.
‘She’s the real thing’
There’s less of the inyour-face lyrical bite that has highlighted her music and in its place more plainspoken introspection — another conscious decision on her part in the pursuit of expanding her horizons as a songwriter.
“You can use different songwriting muscles when you are putting songs together,” she said. “I will never not love the witty turns of phrase that I’ve employed … but I just didn’t want to do that again this time around, because people have come to expect that from me.
“I was curious as to what other pictures I could paint, with not wrapping every single lyric up with a little bow,” she said. “Not everything has to be linear or explained to a T all the time. I think that can wear people out.”
With a little laugh, she added: “I wear myself out with it sometimes.”
All this could add up to a marketing nightmare coming from a more conventional musician, but Musgraves has been anything but conventional.
She demonstrated the spark of an original voice in songs she wrote for others before releasing “Same Trailer, Different Park,” reveling in the quirks of characters that she encountered growing up about 80 miles east of Dallas.
“She’s not someone you can put in a box,” said Cindy Mabe, president of Universal Music Group Nashville. “She’s the real thing, and she follows her own instincts. She lives and dies by her own vision — that’s the way Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were too.”