Premature Evaluation: Kacey Musgraves Middle Of Nowhere

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Dairy Queen is a useful scene-setting device. Like John Mellencamp name-checking the Tastee-Freez, songwriters have been dropping DQ into their songs to evoke a small-town milieu for decades. From Alabama and Alan Jackson to Brad Paisley and Luke Combs, country artists often reference Dairy Queen to connote innocence, community, and working-class grit. Those same humble associations can be wielded negatively. For up-and-coming indie band Charly Bliss, DQ signified resignation to a life of unfulfilled dreams. For city-dweller David Byrne, it was a mystifying alien institution. Wednesday are staunch defenders of Southern living, but when seeking to paint a picture of rural desolation, Karly Hartzman titled her song “The Burned Down Dairy Queen.”

So when Kacey Musgraves starts her new album singing about being “Out there on the edge of the world/ Way past common sense/ Past the Dairy Queen, the county line/ Where there ain’t any fences,” she may be accurately reporting on the view outside her hometown of Golden, Texas, where she returned to gain perspective and draw inspiration for these new songs. But she’s also telegraphing her motives, reframing her image, and tapping back into a longstanding tradition. After some corporate musical chairs, Middle Of Nowhere, out Friday, is Musgraves’ first album for the revived Americana hub Lost Highway Records, where she originally signed in 2011 before the label was folded into Mercury. It’s also her twangiest record since 2015 sophomore set Pageant Material. Do you see that bull on the cover? And the cowboy hat on her head? The message is clear: After years away from country music, Musgraves is back in the saddle.

The album title comes from a sign erected in her East Texas birthplace, which reads, “Golden Texas: Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” It made her laugh. “OK, that’s obviously meant to be a little bit self-deprecating,” Musgraves told Variety, “but there was this quiet confidence about it that I really liked.” Here, the phrase “middle of nowhere” is not just a geographical designation, though it does indicate that she’s gone back home for a reset. It’s also a metaphor, alluding to an unusually long stretch of single living for Musgraves after her split from writer Cole Schafer and, before that, her divorce from fellow singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, as well as the attendant sexual “Dry Spell” documented on the album’s cheeky lead single.

It’s not jokes all the way down — in that same magazine article, Musgraves said she doesn’t want to be a “bumper-sticker songwriter” — but the occasional jolts of humor are welcome. Musgraves’ swooning domestic bliss with Kelly famously inspired 2018’s Golden Hour, her pivot away from mainline country music into a dreamy, genre-blurring folk-pop style, which deservedly became one of the most acclaimed releases in recent memory. Their falling out infamously informed 2021’s excellent if uneven star-crossed, her most overtly poppy collection of songs to date. She holed up at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village and delved into wellness culture for 2024’s Goop-y Deeper Well, a pretty but frictionless album missing the spunky creative spark that first set Musgraves apart. It was easy to imagine the cowboys from the old Pace salsa ad hearing that one and incredulously exclaiming, “New York City?!”

So the inevitable back-to-her-roots album is arriving right on time, though it’s not that simple where Musgraves is concerned. She’s never shied away from her downhome bona fides, but she’s also never romanticized landlocked small towns or leaned into the tired Fox News-y trope that they represent the Real America. Her early albums both celebrated and interrogated her culture of origin, poking and prodding at its mores and traditions. And although Middle Of Nowhere often vigorously embraces the trappings of country music, it does so with the same team that has accompanied Musgraves through her journey beyond the genre’s borders. Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, her main writing partners and co-producers since Golden Hour, have the same roles here, even with early collaborator Luke Laird back in the mix. A parade of veteran pedal steel maestros appears, but so do Golden Hour contributors like Todd Lombardo and Shawn Everett and “Espresso” co-writer Steph Jones. The first song with banjo is also the first one with a dance beat.

In other words, this pivot is merely packaging: same Kacey, different palette. Those soft, sweet songbird vocals; the artful easy-listening arrangements; that delicate balance between tenderhearted empathy, razor-sharp wit, and hippie-dippy philosophizing. For all her costume changes, her voice and persona are so distinctive that you’d never mistake her for anyone else, and they’ve marked out a path through her aesthetic adventures. What’s so appealing about Middle Of Nowhere is not the way it dries out Deeper Well’s lush sonic environment and drops Musgraves back into archetypes that will please certain genre purists. It’s the way that change of stylistic scenery has seemingly reinvigorated her songwriting.

On balance, this is Musgraves’ liveliest, catchiest, smartest, funniest batch of tunes in years — a collection more assured, affecting, and enjoyable than I had allowed myself to hope for after Deeper Well’s detour into smooth placidity. There’s a lot more stylistic variety here than the countrified branding suggests, and those various shades fit together more naturally than some of the twists and turns on star-crossed. It’s an album where the country-western story-song “Back On The Wagon” and the Fleetwood Mac pastiche “Rhinestoned” both make sense, one full of savvy flourishes like the shift into waltz time on the “Middle Of Nowhere” chorus or the spoken “That’s the thing/ She’s really gone!” threaded like punctuation into the spiraling climactic vocal on “Abilene.”

The assortment of moods and perspectives complement each other, too. On songs like “Coyote,” “Hell On Me,” and “Uncertain, TX,” Musgraves looks back on lost love from different angles, trying to make sense of what transpired. Elsewhere, we get a multifaceted look at her present solitary existence. The sex drought we hear about on the tumbleweed-strewn “Dry Spell” is nicely balanced out by “Loneliest Girl,” a Golden Hour-esque track where Musgraves enjoys her freedom from relational hazards: “I don’t have to navigate nobody’s drama/ I don’t have to act like I like all your friends, or your mama/ I don’t have to take on your childhood trauma/ I’m happy to be the loneliest girl in the world.” And by “Mexico Honey,” she’s at least dipping her toe into the dating pool again.

The occasional lyric clangs off the rim. I still can’t tell if the much-debated “Dry Spell” phrase “Lonely with a capital H” is a reach or a brilliant conversation-starter, and I wince at the part of “Mexico Honey” where she half-raps, “We’re getting kinda wine drunk, playing Daft Punk.” But for the most part, her wordplay keeps pace with her melodic acumen. And despite a focus on the ups and downs of the single life, there’s enough leeway for excursions like “Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy,” a deliciously ironic slow jam where country’s prodigal daughter gets to scoff at cosplaying cowpokes whose boots have “never seen any dirt.”

That song pairs Musgraves with bluegrass crossover superstar Billy Strings, but he mostly stays out of her way. Indie-folk troubadour Gregory Alan Isakov similarly hangs back on “Coyote,” a midnight-black ballad that recalls Musgraves’ appearance on the Frozen 2 soundtrack as she reckons with a fearful ex. Even her old smoking buddy Willie Nelson is relegated to a supporting role on “Uncertain, TX,” named for a real-life town that beautifully serves her narrative purposes: “The place I currently live at is barely even on the map/ It’s in the great state of confusion.” Where guest stars are concerned, the main attraction is Musgraves’ longtime foe Miranda Lambert, with whom she finds lots of common ground on the campy, Mariachi-infused duet “Horses & Divorces.” Maybe it’s not quite Drake and Kendrick mending fences, but for country fans, the song is an historic peace summit.

Middle Of Nowhere is full of such treasures. It feels like a homecoming, but not necessarily in the expected sense. Rather than roping in Musgraves within strict genre parameters, the album reminds us of all the ways she can thrive when inspiration strikes. It’s as if she herself remembered what she does best — or, rather, how many things she does best — and consciously set out to reclaim her place as one of the most accomplished artists on the pop-country divide. I don’t know if another Musgraves album will ever take over my life like Golden Hour did, but Middle Of Nowhere is the strongest contender since then.