March 14, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, we’ve got an interview with one of this century's most distinctive country music voices, as she prepares to release an album that brings her back to her roots.

Kelly Christine Sutton

Howdy cowpokes,

I can’t help thinking that Kacey Musgraves has second sight — her timing is always impeccable. The Texas-born artist honed her country craft as a team writer on Nashville’s Music Row before making an indelible mark with her 2013 debut Same Trailer, Different Park, which cast her as a new kind of maverick, one tuned in to the aesthetics and values of millennials who’d grown up as much on MySpace as in beauty pageants and pee wee football matches. Two albums later she shifted gears spectacularly with 2018’s Golden Hour, winning the Grammy for both album of the year and best country album with music that gently defied the genre’s musical conventions while retaining its metaphors and lonesome but loving mood.

Now, with her just-announced sixth album, Middle of Nowhere, she re-enters the heart of country at a moment when two women artists who took her calm courage as inspiration are finding serious commercial success and finally (we can hope) threatening to end the long, exhausting reign of bros in trucker hats. Megan Moroney, who learned much from Musgraves’ wit, and Ella Langley, who channels her vulnerability, recently made history by topping the Billboard 200 albums chart and the Hot 100 singles chart at the same time.

As if summoned by this victory, Musgraves re-enters the realm with the confidence of a master craftsperson ready to claim her place in a lineage of country sophisticates like Bobbie Gentry, Glen Campbell, Dwight Yoakam and Miranda Lambert, who joins her on Middle of Nowhere's “Horses & Divorces,” a duet about connecting with someone you weren’t sure you liked over a shared difficult experience. Unfettered by the need to respond to anyone else’s mandates, Musgraves claims her bona fides with ease on this album, working with both of her core teams: the murderer’s row of Nashville songwriters Shane McAnally, Luke Laird, Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark and Natalie Hemby, and the production team who helped her build Golden Hour and has been by her side since, Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuck.

The album’s lead single exemplifies Musgraves’ ability to capture country’s unique elegance while not letting its conventions stifle her. A long wry joke about a longer “Dry Spell,” it unfurls metaphors for not getting any you-know-what until a listener might want to use a safe word; the pile-up is the real joke, a lighthearted depiction of desperation. The song’s cowboy shuffle and resonant guitar feed the itch the song expresses, but there’s no build, just Musgraves continuing to enumerate the things she’s missing, endlessly swiping left. This is the Kacey of “Die Fun” and “High Horse,” keeping things light while quietly admitting the weight behind her jokes. It realigns her with the comic country royals who inspired her early successes, and links her with younger artists indebted to her example, like Sabrina Carpenter.

Announcing Middle of Nowhere in an exclusive interview with NPR Music contributor Jewly Hight, Musgraves recalled her childhood in the small town of Golden, where she was a yodeling champion steeped in Western swing’s jazzy rhythms. “Those sounds are baked into what feels like home to me. And so exploring them doesn't feel like I'm trying on a hat that doesn't fit. It just feels like part of me. It's always there to some degree, but it felt good this time to really lean into it,” she said. Reconnecting with her collaborators, she leaned into their “different strong points” while keeping the country sensibility that she’d never really abandoned front and center. It’s crucial to note that for Musgraves, that also meant honoring the music of Mexico, which, she revealed to Hight, has become a second home for her. Middle of Nowhere is firmly located somewhere — on the border where the divisions that have lately dominated certain ideologies melt away.

She also traveled throughout Texas. The album’s cover photograph, featuring a real bull (“definitely not” AI, she insisted), was taken on the fly by her sister in Dallas. She also spent time in Austin, where she went to a “super divey dance hall” for some relaxation. “It was really nice to see so many different kinds of people having the best time decked out in their western wear,” she said. “It was hot Latino couples, it was hot Black cowboys, it was older white cowboys dancing with younger cowgirls, and everybody was having such a good time dancing with each other. I was like, ‘Damn, America needs to two-step together. America needs to be on the dance floor.’ It's really a great equalizer, and it's where your differences sort of melt away, and the one goal is to connect via music and have fun and move your body. It made me really inspired to infuse some of that Texas dance hall feeling and rhythms into the record.”

On the heels of Sturgill Simpson/Johnny Blue Skies' funk-inspired Mutiny After Midnight, and with Langley’s honky-tonk heartbreaker “Choosin’ Texas” dominating the singles charts, it’s a good year to break a dry spell on a country music dance floor. Musgraves’s official line about Middle of Nowhere is that it’s inspired by “liminal spaces,” those spots where seemingly nothing important happens, but where life unfolds in small exchanges and internal revolutions. In many ways, honoring such spaces has been Musgraves’ mandate since she first took us to the same trailer in a different park that memorably set the stage for her unfolding story more than a decade ago. With her latest turn, she’s right where she needs to be.

Read the whole, wonderful interview between Kacey Musgraves and Jewly Hight right here.

And if you’re the kind of person who’d prefer to listen to their conversation, you can get that at the blue button below, in the NPR Music podcast feed.

Listen to the Episode

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