Even before her first full-length album was released this March, Kacey Musgraves began making waves in the country music scene by co-writing two popular songs — Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” and “Undermine,” from the popular ABC drama series Nashville — and later by releasing her own hit single, “Merry Go ‘Round.”
Musgrave’s debut, Same Trailer Different Park voices various anxieties of small town life, but not always the pleasant ones. “Merry Go ‘Round,” included on the album, begins with a pleasant high-pitched banjo roll but soon devolves into a cynical reflection on the dreariest aspects of small town life. It’s impossible to ignore the gravity of the lyrics. Musgraves plays on the name “Mary,” which also rhymes with “merry” and “marry” to characterize a particular southern lifestyle characterized by joy, material love, drugs and infidelity, and declaring that people marry out of boredom. These are all themes usually hinted at in country music, but not necessarily central to a song — much less an entire album.
Musgraves is clearly lyrically ambitious, and even the weaker songs boast impressive lyrics. In “Dandelion” — a deceptively cheerful title if there ever was one — Musgraves compares her desire for a guy to wishing on a dandelion, singing “Spent my wishes on a weed/ Thinking it could change my world/ Dandelion.”
By now we’re all used to the Adele breakup album, and surely anyone with a radio is familiar with the Taylor Swift breakup anthems, but Musgraves manages to take a different angle. When it comes to relationships, a tinge of cynicism lends her an almost feminist maturity that’s rare in such a young artist — as evidenced in “Follow Your Arrow,” where she sings, “You’re damned if you do/And you’re damned if you don’t/ So you might as well just do/ Whatever you want.”
Musgrave is more playful with her themes and much less dramatic than her contemporaries. She speaks not only to the general anxieties of small town life — insular social structures, boredom and the results of both — but she also speaks specifically to the feminine anxieties of small town life — what is expected of a girl, or a woman, in that environment.
Whereas Swift came to country music fans much younger in a loud rush of fame, Musgraves took a much quieter route, emerging steadily and modestly. Her album, though, is loud in content and lyrically provocative. The 24-year-old Musgraves is the modern feminist poet of the Nashville country scene. She offers no manifesto, no propaganda, but only very strong assertions about the feminine spirit. Calling things as she sees them, like in the final track “It Is What It Is,” where she comments, “Maybe I love you, Maybe I’m just kind of bored,” she offers a unapologetically liberating message to listeners.
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