Kacey Musgraves released the ‘Mexico Honey’ video, a karaoke-bar romance shot on location in Mexico by directing duo Running Bear
Kacey Musgraves has spent a decade making country music that treats pleasure as a legitimate subject, and her new video makes the argument in the most direct terms yet. On Wednesday (July 22), the eight-time Grammy winner released the official visual for “Mexico Honey,” the sultry standout from her sixth studio album Middle of Nowhere, and it opens with her onstage at a karaoke bar singing her own song to a room of strangers. Shot on location in Mexico and directed by Running Bear, the duo of Alexa Stone and Stephen Kinigopoulos, the clip is framed as a tribute to a country that has shaped her writing and her life away from it.
The karaoke conceit is the smartest thing in it. Musgraves performs “Mexico Honey” in a neon-green room to an audience of patrons, and the footage of that performance is intercut with the story it describes: a whirlwind romance with a mysterious partner, tequila shots, a hand out the passenger window of a speeding car, an intimate shower scene. Structurally it turns the song into a memory being recounted rather than an event unfolding, which suits a lyric about falling for a place and a person so completely that leaving stops being an option.
Bare Skin and a Boa Constrictor
The video has generated most of its headlines for a handful of deliberately provocative images. In one sequence Musgraves covers herself with a brightly colored tropical bird. In another she wades through rainforest water with a yellow boa constrictor draped across her shoulders. Both are playful rather than gratuitous, closer in spirit to the song’s own cheek than to shock tactics, and they sit alongside telenovela-styled romance sequences that give the whole thing a knowing warmth. The opening frame sets the register immediately: the title in pink cursive, then Musgraves delivering the first line about being in a bad girl good mood, wearing her gold hoops.
“Mexico Honey” was written by Musgraves with Luke Laird and Steph Jones, longtime collaborators from her Nashville circle, and it became a breakout favorite from Middle of Nowhere without ever being pushed as a lead single. The video is the label catching up to what listeners already decided.
A Deliberate Follow-Up to Deeper Well
Context matters for understanding the pivot. Middle of Nowhere arrived in the spring as the follow-up to 2024’s Deeper Well, a hushed, interior record that traded the disco shimmer of Golden Hour for something closer to meditation. Middle of Nowhere is the loosening: it features Willie Nelson, and it finally paired Musgraves with Miranda Lambert on “Horses and Divorces,” a collaboration that quietly ended one of country’s longest-running rumored feuds.
The rollout has matched the record’s mood. Musgraves played a surprise Coachella set in April, debuting “Middle of Nowhere,” “Back on the Wagon,” and “Uncertain, TX” live, and in March she appeared in drag as Ronnie Dunn to cover Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon.” Next month she receives the ACM Spirit Award at the 19th Academy of Country Music Honors, and a North American tour follows this fall.
For an artist who was once nearly exiled from country radio for singing about rolling joints and kissing girls on “Follow Your Arrow,” the “Mexico Honey” video reads less like provocation than continuity. Musgraves has always insisted that country music has room for appetite. Twelve years and eight Grammys later, she no longer has to argue the point.
