A cursory glance at the country singer Kacey Musgraves’s 2013 début album, “Same Trailer Different Park,” might have made her seem like the latest in a long line of unremarkable, industry-approved ingénues. On the cover, she poses demurely in late-afternoon sunshine—a very pretty twenty-four-year-old wearing a very short skirt and cowboy boots. The first track features finger-picked guitar, woozy Dobro, and a crush of clichés (“You’ve been run through the wringer and pushed plumb to your limits”). Next is “My House,” a paean to domestic mobility (“The K.O.A. is A.O.K. as long as I’m with you”). So far, so Nashville.
Then comes “Merry-Go-Round.” Suddenly, the harmonies grow more intricate and less predictable, and the lyrics sharpen. The first two tracks proved that Musgraves was a solid guitar player and a limpid singer; on “Merry-Go-Round,” her voice is supple, able to convey indignation and resignation within a single line. “If you ain’t got two kids by twenty-one, you’re probably gonna die alone, at least that’s what tradition tells you. And it don’t matter if you don’t believe—come Sunday morning, you best be there in the front row like you’re supposed to.” The chorus employs the sort of Sondheim-esque wordplay that looks facile when written but sounds perfectly clever when sung: “Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay, brother’s hooked on Mary Jane, and Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down. Mary, Mary, quite contrary—we get bored so we get married . . . On this broken merry-go-round.” The melody spins in tight circles before ending where it began, held by centripetal force. Some phrases—“Just like dust, we settle in this town”—sound like clichés, until you realize you’ve never actually heard them before. Even the album’s title scans differently in context: “Same hurt in every heart; same trailer, different park.” Is this a country song or a Walker Evans photograph?
It’s almost definitional that country music should celebrate small-town American life, not skewer it. Plenty of country songs are depressing, but the flaws they recount—inebriation, infidelity, depraved-heart murder—tend to be personal, not systemic. Musgraves, by comparison, can be downright Swiftian (Jonathan, not Taylor). The track after “Merry-Go-Round” is “Dandelion,” about the futility of superstition and the cruelty of fate; then comes “Blowin’ Smoke,” a portrait of three women who use vindictiveness to keep their minds off their own social immobility. Musgraves grew up in Golden, a town of about four hundred people in East Texas. “Same Trailer Different Park” sounds like the kiss-off she spent her adolescence writing.
She has been apologizing for it ever since. Her second album, “Pageant Material,” was released last month, and it is much more “My House” than “Merry-Go-Round,” for better and for worse. “Maybe for a minute I got too big for my britches,” she sings, in “Dime Store Cowgirl.” “I’m still the girl from Golden, had to get away so I could grow. But it don’t matter where I’m goin’, I’ll still call my home town home.” Another song is called “This Town,” a title that would have inspired the old Musgraves to spin a dark tale about a parochial panopticon. But the new Musgraves is sentimental: “Around here we all look out for each other.” She told NPR that, after “Merry-Go-Round” was released, “I had one guy say, ‘This is the anti-country song.’ And I had to say, ‘Sorry, no, it’s just an anti-small-mind song.’ ” Many country fans are musically conservative, and are uninterested in buying any record they imagine to be anti-country. Musgraves might have calculated that preaching jeremiads to the choir was bad for business.
Again and again, on “Pageant Material,” she either holds her punches or punches up, and even then she keeps it classy. She sometimes sounds focus-grouped, as if she is considering a run for office. The song that strays farthest from boosterism is the title track, a humblebrag about falling short of beauty-pageant standards. This is framed, albeit disingenuously, as a personal failing; misogyny and body-image issues are not mentioned directly. In another song, Musgraves refuses membership in “the good ol’ boys’ club,” saying, “I appreciate you, but no thanks.” That’s about as socially conscious as it gets. The rest of the album is downright Swiftian (Taylor, not Jonathan).
Or perhaps the more instructive comparison is to Loretta Lynn, whom Musgraves has cited as her primary influence. Though Lynn could be political (as in “The Pill,” her 1975 song about birth control), the vast majority of her songs were personal; and, more to the point, she never threw the South under the bus. Her signature song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” makes an Appalachian childhood during the Depression sound like a long weekend of glamping. If she could pull that off, surely Musgraves can find the good in Golden.
In 1935, the Kentucky-born poet Allen Tate wrote about the dilemma of writing Southern literature that would be “read curiously as travel literature by Northern people alone.” This is not exclusively a Southern problem. Artists of many extractions have struggled with the question of how much of their people’s dirty laundry they should air in public—see, e.g., Philip Roth’s “Writing About Jews,” or Dave Chappelle’s explanation, to Oprah Winfrey, of why he quit his show (“I know the difference between people laughing with me and people laughing at me”). In 1978, in an essay called “Going Back to Georgia,” Walker Percy wrote, “One nice lady in my home town said to me the other day: ‘You’re just like certain other Southern writers—no sooner do they get published in New York than they turn on the South and criticize it.’ I didn’t have the nerve but I felt like saying: ‘You’re damn right, lady. I sure do.’ ”
Another chronicler of Southern life, Harper Lee, is currently the best-selling author in the country. In her beloved “To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, Lee portrays Maycomb as a bucolic Alabama town, despite its flaws; in “Go Set a Watchman,” published last week by HarperCollins, Maycomb is overrun with conformists and hypocrites. “There’s no place for me in Maycomb, and I’ll never be entirely at home any place else,” Jean Louise Finch says.
Musgraves seems similarly ambivalent—not finished criticizing her home town, but not sure she has the nerve to say so. During a recent onstage interview, it was suggested that she had “a love-hate relationship with the town you grew up in.”
“Oh, no, it’s all love,” Musgraves said. “I mean, it’s just—there’s a lot of truth, though.”
“Merry-Go-Round” was Kacey Musgraves’s first single, and it was neither a hit nor a flop. Then she put out “Follow Your Arrow,” which reached the country Top Ten. The song begins with jokes about sexual double standards—“If you save yourself for marriage, you’re a bore. If you don’t save yourself for marriage you’re a hor . . . rible person”—before settling into a more anodyne girl-power message: “Make lots of noise, kiss lots of boys—or kiss lots of girls, if that’s something you’re into . . . Roll up a joint, or don’t—Just follow your arrow wherever it points.” This was boundary-pushing of a more familiar kind. Katy Perry, a child of megachurch pastors whose breakout single also smiled on girls who kiss girls, invited Musgraves to open for her on a world tour.
Musgraves often composes with the veteran Nashville songwriters Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark. While writing “Follow Your Arrow,” they riffed on the song’s civil-libertarian theme. Clark suggested “Mind your own biscuits,” and McAnally completed the thought: “…and life will be gravy.” Musgraves was so pleased with the line that they built another song around it—“Biscuits,” the lead single from “Pageant Material.” Self-empowerment anthems pose a dilemma for Musgraves, because they are both her most popular songs and her least interesting ones. “Biscuits” is good, clean fun—lilting banjo arpeggio, stomping kick drum, a rush of “oooh”s in the backup vocals—but, apart from a sly reference to pot, it has been scrubbed of social commentary. The message is now simple individualism: “I’ll just do me and, honey, you can just do you.”
Another line in “Biscuits” is “If you ain’t got nothing nice to say, don’t say nothing at all.” On “Pageant Material,” whenever Musgraves runs out of unambiguously nice things to say about Texas, she turns inward. “Fine,” narrated by a character who is anything but, is a breakup waltz that swoons with melancholy; it sounds like something Musgraves might have written for Patsy Cline. “Late to the Party,” with its airy vibe and four chords repeated in a simple pattern, veers perilously close to surf-rock, but a few well-chosen details pull it back from the brink. The lyrics are as economical as a sonnet:
This kind of material is the ideal showcase for Musgraves’s voice, which is lithe but not thin, youthful but not chaste, and always unhurried. And the song’s subject—the intimate, exalted feeling of entering a party on the right person’s arm—is exactly the right kind of topic, neither too big nor too small, to tackle in a three-minute pop song.
Even when Musgraves isn’t saying much, she says it well. “High Time,” a laid-back mélange of whistling, handclaps, and Burt Bacharach-style strings, is likely about little more than what it sounds like—Musgraves has toured with Willie Nelson—but who cares? “Family Is Family” throws enough chordal curveballs to keep listeners alert, and its lyrics are far smarter than they need to be (“They own too much wicker and drink too much liquor; you’d wash your hands of them, but blood’s always thicker”). This is the sort of safe territory that Musgraves seems determined to occupy, at least for now. At the 2013 Country Music Awards, she wore a nose ring and played “Follow Your Arrow”; when she got to the phrase “roll up a joint,” her voice was censored. Last year, at the same awards show, she emerged without a guitar, her hair in a high bun, to perform an old standard, “You’re Lookin’ at Country,” with the woman who wrote it, Loretta Lynn. “I’m about as old-fashioned as I can be, and I hope you’re liking what you see,” Musgraves sang.
In “Go Set a Watchman,” Jean Louise’s Uncle Jack tells her, “It takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days. You don’t have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it.” According to “Watchman” ’s publisher, Harper Lee wrote it in the nineteen-fifties, as an early draft of what would become “Mockingbird.” There are reasons to doubt this version of events; but, on its face, it is plausible that an artist’s first depiction of her home town would over-represent its flaws, and that her second attempt would overcorrect toward sappiness. A more mature authorial voice would be a synthesis between the two—neither self-righteously indignant nor willfully naïve. It’s safe to assume that Lee, who is eighty-nine, will never write such a book. Maybe Kacey Musgraves, on some future record, can do for Golden what Lee never did for Maycomb.
