Kacey Musgraves returns to her Texas roots on ‘Middle of Nowhere,’ her strongest album since ‘Golden Hour,’ out now on Lost Highway Records
Kacey Musgraves has spent a decade and a half proving she can go anywhere. She turned Nashville’s conservatism inside out on Same Trailer Different Park, chased cosmic country on Golden Hour, dismantled a marriage in real time on Star-Crossed, and touched grass on Deeper Well. On Middle of Nowhere, her seventh studio album released May 1 on Lost Highway Records, she stops moving long enough to look backward and finds that the most honest version of herself was there all along, somewhere between Golden, Texas and the county line.
The institutional context matters here. Lost Highway, the Americana imprint revived by Interscope last April, counts Musgraves as its first marquee signee, and she repays that faith with a record that functions as both homecoming and statement of purpose. Kacey Musgraves produced it alongside long time collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, reuniting early co-writers like Luke Laird, Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark with the Golden Hour production team, a combination that yields something rare: a pivot that feels completely organic.
In a statement, she described the album’s origins as,
the longest single period of my life” spent alone, one she ultimately embraced as sovereignty rather than solitude. “I became so at ease with being in the ‘middle of nowhere’ in many senses,” she said, “and sitting in the un-comfort of the undefined”
Steel Guitar, Mandolin, and the Weight of Wit
The instrumentation throughout is lean and deliberate: steel guitar, mandolin, accordion, banjo on occasion, a relaxed vocal drawl that mirrors the record’s unhurried emotional arc. This is the steely, stripped-down storytelling lineage of Same Trailer Different Park, not the psychedelic sweep of Golden Hour or the synth-driven fatalism of Star-Crossed. The influences of Willie Nelson and late mentor John Prine are undeniable, these songs painted with brushstrokes of poeticism and outlaw country, meandering with intention.
Lead single “Dry Spell“ arrives early and announces the album’s register without apology: funny, twangy, and lyrically precise in its documentation of 335 days of abstinence. Folk musician Gregory Alan Isakov contributes a whimsical cameo on “Coyote,” a liminal dispatch from the desert that ranks among the album’s finest moments. Bluegrass darling Billy Strings joins for “Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy,” a pointed critique of Western fashion masquerading as lifestyle. The album’s most-discussed collaboration, however, is with Miranda Lambert on “Horses and Divorces,” the two Texas women putting years of rumored tension to rest over a waltzing accordion and a mariachi band, trading verses until they agree that their shared history is “whiskey under the bridge.”
A Return That Earns Its Nostalgia
The album closes on “Hell on Me,” a sparse guitar ballad that Rolling Stone calls “quite possibly her most devastating song to date,” one that resists the urge to wrap the record’s themes of loneliness and late-thirties singlehood in anything comfortable. It is a deliberate choice from a songwriter who told Variety she has no interest in being a “bumper-sticker songwriter,” and it holds. Willie Nelson appears on “Uncertain, TX,” an accordion-drenched duet where the two trade lines with an ease that speaks to the 37-year age gap between them meaning absolutely nothing when the song is right.
Middle of Nowhere is Musgraves’ strongest full-length since 2018’s Golden Hour, the Album of the Year Grammy winner that redefined what country music could look and sound like. It does not attempt to match that record’s expansiveness. It does something harder: it earns its restraint. For a songwriter who has always known how to move, this is the album that proves she also knows when to stay.
Middle of Nowhere is out now on Lost Highway Records.
