You can practically see the tumbleweeds blowing down the road as the accordion comes into focus on “Uncertain, TX” toward the back half of Kacey Musgraves’s newest record. The singer reassures her listeners that they’re not lost, but “barely even on the map,” as she puts it, somewhere between mixed feelings and a self-imposed fantasy of what to make of love after love has had its way with you. In an effort to ground herself by retreating to her border-town roots, Musgraves may have just found the perfect canvas to illustrate what isolation, at least in the romantic sense, can do to an undistracted psyche. Is the cowboy really riding in from over that hill, or is this just a mirage of fantasy mixed in with the South Texas heat? We really never get a clear answer, but she seems to find some solace within herself along the way.
It would be an overgeneralization to call Middle of Nowhere another breakup or divorce album, given that Musgraves has been unpacking her relationships with a pretty firm-narrative stance for the better part of a decade. You can see the stages of grief start at star-crossed, where glitzy heartbreak lullabies gave way to a more new age getting-over-you technique on 2024’s Deeper Well. Both serve their purpose in her story and hold her identity in high regard, but this album seems to go deep into what made Musgraves a standout in the first place and highlights what could keep her as one to look forward to. Take the title track, where Musgraves rolls into town with the windows rolled down, and that attitude turned up, shooting a snarky “tell me you miss me, I don’t care,” from the hip to whoever just got left in the last county. Being alone is the most comfortable she’s sounded in years.
The move back home is as much of a rewiring of her writing as it is her aesthetics, quips flying out of the side of her mouth as she skips pebbles from here to Mexico (the distance is maybe a stone’s throw away). “Back on the Wagon,” her most country and maybe best fitting number here, takes bits of her 60’s female counterparts’ affinity for giving grace while packing some modern woman language in its footnotes. There’s the tongue-in-cheek kiss and make-up with longstanding rival Miranda Lambert, where the duo treats the beef as “whiskey under the bridge,” on “Horses & Divorces.” The song nearly emulates a moment of commiseration between two small-town gals whose rivalry dates back to the high school yearbook. Even the record’s one-liner-laden lead single “Dry Spell” can be seen as sort of a retroactive thesis statement for this extended stay in rural America: quiet, sexless, soul-searching, but somehow right where it needs to be.
Those vast spaces of open road give Musgraves the freedom to move around in her feelings about her new state of self pretty freely. However, her male counterparts in the features department are expertly cast as soft-spoken spirits, maybe the last of the hangers-on still haunting her back home. Folkie Gregory Alan Isakov does some background harmonizing on “Coyotes,” where the two are in unison but maybe spiritually out of sync. Billy Strings creeps into the periphery on “Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy,” where Musgraves is turning her nose up at the cosplay but maybe remembering a former partner that actually did have some red dirt wedged between his bootsoles. If the concept is a ghost town, then Musgraves understands that ghouls are bound to pop up somewhere.
Off the eye test, this is Kacey Musgraves’s most discernibly country album since “Pageant Material,” but it also might be her most self-assured. Call it home-field advantage on, “Loneliest Girl in the World,” where pop-star zings and that crying outlaw steels intermingle in a moment that can comfortably dig a heel into both camps. Or take “Rhinestoned,” a flowery ballad in Tecovas that could make a dusty dive shine with glitter. The form has been familiar, but a return to a more personal point of inspiration does wonders for Musgraves as a writer, a performer, and by her account, maybe even as an individual. Middle of Nowhere finds Musgraves sifting through singledom, or maybe trying to make peace with it, and what better place to do that than in her hometown, Golden, Texas, where the population currently sits at 156? As you enter the city, the sign reads “Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” It’s no surprise she can still learn a lot about herself within its borders.
