Earlier this month at the Academy of Country Music awards, there was minor controversy when the host, Nashville grande dame Reba McEntire, performed a new song and everyone got to their feet apart from Kacey Musgraves. Someone tweeted: “Have a little respect… at least for someone who paved the way for you.” It wasn’t the first time Musgraves had made headlines by failing to show rapture at an awards do. Country is worse than rap and pop for pitching its women against each other in imaginary battles. “At this point in my career,” 30-year-old Musgraves says down the line from Nashville, “if you see me at some kind of show, you should enjoy the fact that I’m not a robot. Do you ever see someone analysing Chris Stapleton’s face? Men don’t get that. Everyone needs to drop it.”
In February, Musgraves’s fourth album, Golden Hour, received the Grammy for best album – not just best country album, but best album period. The genre is transforming, the think-pieces said: there are liberal, outspoken young females in Nashville for the first time (as though the Dixie Chicks never happened). There are, of course, the Opry traditionalists. But there are pop artists, too, who like Taylor Swift happened to cut their teeth on Nashville publishing deals and used the occasional banjo in songs. Musgraves, who competed on the TV talent show Nashville Star in 2007, exploited the tension between the old and new worlds with her 2015 song Good Ol’ Boys Club. She exploited it with the title of her debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, which pointed to dirt-poor beginnings this daughter of an artist and a print-maker didn’t really have.
She set out her stall as a liberal at the start with Follow Your Arrow: “roll up a joint, or don’t… kiss lots of boys, or kiss lots of girls if that’s what you’re into” (the lyrics were censored at the Country Music Association awards). You wonder what the Grand Ole Opry would think when she tells me: “I’ve never considered myself a country artist. I’m not focused on what is or isn’t country music. I couldn’t care less. Does it feel like me? Then I’m fucking game.”
Musgraves was born in Golden, Texas, a town that grew out of a sawmill. Her parents run a graphic design shop in nearby Mineola. As a child, she sang western swing on Saturday nights in concert halls around Texas, dressed in boots and rhinestone. She was a normal 90s kid listening to Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys – but with Shania Twain and Sheryl Crow on her Walkman too, there was, she thinks, a “plethora of female perspective” in country music at the time.
The Musgraves fuelled her ambitions: her sister still takes her photographs. Her parents printed her flyers in their shop – and her gigs were booked by her grandmother, who financed a self-titled album after high school. “I didn’t have a unique perspective,” she says of her teenage efforts. “I felt like the biggest nerd in many ways. None of my friends were dressing up in western wear and singing for people twice their age. I knew it was something I enjoyed, but I felt like a loner.”
It was a local musician, John DeFoore, now in his 70s, who turned Musgraves from “karaoke kid” to songwriter. She took guitar lessons with him from the age of 12 to 16, walking to his studios in Mineola’s abandoned Beckham railway hotel. “John dreamed of restoring it,” she says. “It had a ballroom, and in his words it was ‘full of spirits’.” DeFoore’s roster also includes Miranda Lambert and Michelle Shocked. His website says: just tell me what you want to learn.
“Right away he knew I wasn’t a kid who was going to learn by repetition and scales,” Musgraves says. “He said: ‘Next week when you come back, I want you to have written a song, and I don’t care how bad you think it is.’” By questioning her chord choices, and making her tapes of her creations, DeFoore “weirdly gave me exactly the tools I needed to move to Nashville and pursue an actual career as a staff songwriter,” she says. She got a writing deal at 20, just a year after coming to town.
Musgraves’s song Undermine featured in Music City’s global TV export, Nashville. She met also her husband, the country singer Ruston Kelly, when they were paired up to write for the show. “Nashville is equal parts completely contrived and very real,” she says. “As someone in the industry, seeing people singing songs written by my friends and me, it was really fucking weird. We had a drinking game: do a shot when you see someone you know in the background. By the end you’d be completely obliterated.”
The show did much to explain the industry to the world, but also its prejudices: not least against gay artists, forced to choose between coming out and keeping their contracts. Does Musgraves, who has a big gay following, think anything is changing? “I don’t know,” she says, sounding glum. “There are unfortunately a lot of people in Nashville that feel they can’t disclose who they really are.”
A recent study of 500 top country songs from 2014-2018 showed that only 16% were performed by women. Musgraves says: “I am tired of the gender conversation. I’m more interested in good songs rather than what is between somebody’s legs. It could be a llama singing for all I care.”
She recently said there were more important issues in the industry – why aren’t there more artists of colour? We speak a month after Lil Nas X’s country-rap hybrid single Old Town Road charted in Billboard’s Hot 100, R&B and country charts at the same time – before being quietly removed from the last. Tradition and lack of equal opportunities explains the dearth of black country musicians, Musgraves says, “but there are so many outlets for people to make music, so many more chances for people to be artists if they are inclined to be. It takes years for main format to evolve.”
Since Trump got in, it’s a line you hear more and more from American musicians: the country’s downhearted enough without political songs; music should be an escape. “Anyone could look at my older albums and decipher where I stand in my views,” says Musgraves, but she won’t be drawn. “I don’t want to ruminate on the things that are wrong with the country right now.” Is she under pressure from management to keep her opinions in check? She laughs. “I might be warned, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to listen.”
Golden Hour represents a change in her writing towards greater space and tenderness. “Instead of focusing on turning a phrase, or trying to out-clever myself, this album was more about feeling my way through than thinking my way through.”
There’s a subtle movement in songwriting now, expressed by Musgraves and Sharon Van Etten, and even Taylor Swift: writing from a place of happiness is more creative than mining the classic bad guy motif.
“Creative people commonly have the misconception that they need to be in some kind of a suffering state to create,” Musgraves says. “And that can be dangerous. I’ve definitely found myself staying in unhealthy situations longer than I should have because I was getting something out of it. I was not aware I could find the same level of inspiration when I’m happy. But inspiration is always floating around, accessible to everyone.”
Beneath her anxious moments – a result, perhaps, of being cast as country’s newest outlaw – you get the sense that Musgraves is a hippy at heart. “I’m not doing anything that groundbreaking,” she says. “I’m just filtering the sediment out of life and making it into my songs.” She advocates microdosing for writing music. While falling in love made her feel “a growth spurt, more connected to the human experience”, so does a tiny amount of LSD.
“Any chance you have to be taken outside the human ego is pretty invaluable, however you can get there,” she says. “We are everything, but we are nothing at all. I’m inspired by anything that gives you more appreciation for this living rock we are on, floating in space. A change in perspective is a beautiful thing. You can use it as a tool if you pay attention, and you’re not reckless.”
Her horse, which is kept on a farm 40 minutes from her Nashville home, is also a major source of inspiration. “He’s black, and really pretty, and a little overweight, and he acts like a sweet little boy,” she says. “I would put him in my bathtub if I could. It’s soul food when I go out there and smell the dirt, and work up a sweat, spend time taking care of something that is not me.”
Musgraves does not quite feel media-trained in that smiling, impenetrable, Nashville way. She says putting on an act is not an option, which explains why, at awards ceremonies, if she feels like staying in her seat she will.
“This career is full of certain sacrifices, not seeing your family, your privacy being put on the line – so there’s nothing that would make not being myself worth it anyway,” she says. “It would be terribly empty if I didn’t have honesty but I had the fucking crazy lifestyle on top of it. I would literally go and shovel shit in a horse barn before that happens.” Which, as we know, isn’t a bad option at all.
Kate Mossman is features editor of the New Statesman. Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves (MCA Nashville/Decca) is out now