On the title track of her last album, “Deeper Well,” Kacey Musgraves sounded like she had it all figured out. The cosmic country iconoclast had taken a spiritual audit of her life and decided to nix what was dragging her down: Out went people with “dark energy” and her daily morning hit off a homemade gravity bong. Like a yoga instructor inviting her class into savasana pose, Musgraves declared, in a serene, jade-smooth voice, “I’ve found a deeper well.”
A grittier and more down-to-earth wisdom suffuses Musgraves’s sixth album, “Middle of Nowhere,” a satisfying return to form and easily her best LP since the luminous, Grammy-winning 2018 triumph “Golden Hour.” The bubble of tranquillity that made much of “Deeper Well” feel too frictionless has popped, and the itch of dissatisfaction has returned to Musgraves’s music, along with a bite and texture that some of her recent work had been lacking.
“It’s a drought out here, waiting on a storm,” Musgraves drawls on the twangy lead single “Dry Spell,” which overflows with bawdy, Sabrina Carpenter-like humor — perhaps a bit too much. Still, this album makes the case that loneliness and even unintentional celibacy are better than losing oneself in a toxic relationship. On the lovely, lilting title track, Musgraves pines for solitude and wide-open spaces, particularly where “there’s no reckless men who don’t know what they want.”
Someone has clearly broken this cowgirl’s heart. That much is clear from the chilling, Fleetwood Mac-esque “I Believe in Ghosts” and, in a cheekier register, the witty commitment-phobe sendup “Uncertain, TX,” which features backing vocals from Willie Nelson and is one of several tracks that invites a welcome Tejano influence into Musgraves’s sonic world. The throwback country ballad “Back on the Wagon” finds Musgraves doing her best Tammy Wynette, complete with “Stand by Your Man” levels of willful self-delusion: “Maybe I’m just naïve, but I truly believe that he really means it this time,” she sings of a self-destructive beau, accompanied by the ominous wails of the pedal steel guitarist Paul Franklin, whose playing enhances many of these songs’ arrangements. The album’s wrenching closer, the aptly titled “Hell on Me,” suggests that he did not, in fact, mean it this time.
But unlike her 2021 release “Star Crossed,” which chronicled the dissolution of Musgraves’s marriage to the singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, “Middle of Nowhere” can’t be classified solely as a breakup album. It is instead a meditation on the differences between the ache of loneliness and the contentment of solitude, a journey of self-discovery that digs for something more realistic — and, on the twinkling “Rhinestoned,” more weed-positive — than the new-age truisms of “Deeper Well.”
“No service on the phone, and I’m alone, but it honestly feels good,” Musgraves sings on the title track. The mid-tempo soft-rocker “Loneliest Girl” finds comfort in stasis: “I’m happy to be the loneliest girl in the world,” she sings. Despite her not being (as she recently put it) a “finger on the ear, finger waving in the air, Mariah Carey-style” singer, Musgraves’s voice is nonetheless a beautiful, remarkably multifaceted instrument, able to convey a range of emotions and often glowing, as if from within, with a kind of prismatic incandescence.
Though the album contemplates and often celebrates solitude, it features more guests than any of Musgraves’s previous releases, including the bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings and the folk troubadour Gregory Alan Isakov. About half of the songs were written and produced with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, the team who worked on her previous three albums, and on the rest she reunites with Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, the Nashville musicians who helped Musgraves inject her fiery personality into more traditional country structures on her first two excellent albums, “Same Trailer Different Park” and “Pageant Material.”
The album’s most memorable collaborator, though, is another outspoken country queen from middle-of-nowhere, Texas: Miranda Lambert, who joins Musgraves for the hilarious and gorgeously lush duet “Horses and Divorces.” Confirming a longtime rumor, Musgraves recently admitted that she and Lambert previously had beef (“grass-fed, grade A,” she told Variety), and said that the idea for the song came to her when she saw an Instagram photo of Lambert and one of her equine companions and thought to herself, “Well, I guess we have two things in common: horses and divorces.”
That line was clearly destined to inspire a song, and Musgraves invited Lambert to write and sing it with her. The two women trade knowing barbs (“I could ride in on my high horse, but you’d still be higher,” Lambert offers, while Musgraves replies, “And a few years ago you’d have set me on fire”), ultimately realizing, from the bottom of a shared bottle, “Maybe we’re more alike than we think.” The actual, admitted antagonism, and the fact that we are hearing two people work it out on the remix, so to speak, gives the song a special charge.
The album’s only real misfire, the half-rapped profession of lust “Mexico Honey,” is an indicator that the “dry spell” announced toward the beginning of the album is over. But creatively, “Middle of Nowhere” is anything but a dry spell; this is her true return to a deeper well.
Kacey Musgraves “Middle of Nowhere” (Lost Highway)
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the music newsletter The Amplifier.
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