Album Review: Kacey Musgraves, Middle of Nowhere

Kacey Musgraves signed with the relaunched Lost Highway Records as the country label's first artist since Interscope Records announced its revival, having being originally signed to the label in 2011 as its final artist, before the label folded into Mercury Nashville a year later. And with Middle of Nowhere, the eight times Grammy Award-winning Texan, has delivered quite the calling card.

Across Western swing, bluegrass, country and traditional Mexican music – norteña, mariachi and zydeco – Musgraves takes the listener on a vivid, pictorial road trip across the borderlands.

Fleeing small-town Texas on ‘Abilene’, the fugitive character “went out for cigarettes, ended up on a bus, headed up somewhere, didn’t really care where it was, as long as it was far away”; while even the jackals and prairie wolves on ‘Coyote’ are skedaddling, seeking salvation.

Jaunty ‘Loneliest Girl’ embraces the solitude, listing a compelling catalogue of good reasons to be free and single and ‘Dry Spell’ doubles down on the jape with the cheeky lyric “lonely with a capital H”.

Elsewhere ‘Horses & Divorces’ finds Musgraves and Miranda Lambert burying the hatchet on a wonderful waltz, singing “we both love Willie, but I mean really, what asshole doesn’t like Willie?” and the Outlaw King himself performs a deft turn on ‘Uncertain, TX’.

Terrific stuff.

9/10