First Impressions of Kacey Musgraves’ Middle of Nowhere

Dairy Queen has long served as a handy tool for shaping a specific small‑town backdrop in songs and storytelling. For decades, lyricists have tucked Dairy Queen into melodies to evoke a sense of community, simplicity, and working‑class resolve. From Alabama’s country lineage through Alan Jackson to contemporary voices like Brad Paisley and Luke Combs, the Dairy Queen reference often signals innocence and neighborhood solidarity. Yet those same associations can be wielded with a harsher edge. For the rising indie outfit Charly Bliss, DQ stood for a resigned acceptance of dreams left unfulfilled. For urban observer David Byrne, it remained a baffling, almost extraterrestrial institution. Wednesday’s frontwoman Karly Hartzman has championed Southern life, but when aiming to conjure a landscape of rural desolation she chose to name a track “The Burned Down Dairy Queen.”

So when Kacey Musgraves opens her new record by singing about being “out there on the edge of the world, far beyond common sense, past the Dairy Queen, beyond the county line, where there aren’t any fences,” she’s not merely reporting on the view from Golden, Texas. She’s also signaling motive, reframing her public persona, and tapping into a time‑honored tradition. After a period of corporate repositioning, Middle Of Nowhere, releasing this week, marks Musgraves’ return to the revived Americana hub Lost Highway Records, the imprint she originally joined in 2011 before it was folded into Mercury. It also stands as her most country‑leaning work since her 2015 sophomore set Pageant Material. Do you notice the bull on the cover? And the cowboy hat perched on her head? The message is unmistakable: after years away, Musgraves is back in the saddle.

The album’s title hails from a sign in her East Texas birthplace that reads, “Golden Texas: Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” It made her smile. “Okay, that’s clearly meant to be a little self‑deprecating,” Musgraves told Variety, “but there’s a quiet confidence there that I really connected with.” In this instance, the phrase “middle of nowhere” functions not only as a geographical descriptor, though it does mark her return home for a reset. It’s also a metaphor for a notably long stretch of singledom after her split from writer Cole Schafer, following her earlier divorce from fellow musician Ruston Kelly, and the accompanying romantic drought linked to the album’s flirtatious lead single.

It isn’t all jokey. In the same Variety piece, Musgraves noted she doesn’t want to become a “bumper‑sticker songwriter.” Still, the occasional jolt of humor lands with welcome precision. Musgraves’ blissful domestic phase with Kelly famously inspired 2018’s Golden Hour, a pivot away from straight‑ahead country toward a dreamy blend of folk and pop that earned near‑universal praise. Their break informed 2021’s excellent, if uneven, star-crossed, her most overtly pop‑leaning set to date. She retreated to Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village and explored wellness culture on the 2024 Goop‑tinged Deeper Well, a pretty but stride‑free collection that lacked the vivacious spark she’s known for. One might imagine those old Pace salsa‑era cowboys hearing that album and squinting in disbelief at “New York City.”

So this return‑to‑roots project lands at a timely moment, though Musgraves’ relationship to place is more nuanced than a simple homecoming. She has never concealed her down‑home credentials, yet she’s rarely romanticized landlocked small towns or bought into a tired “Real America” stereotype. Her early work celebrated and probed the customs of her upbringing, both honoring and interrogating its rituals. And while Middle Of Nowhere can be read as a country‑leaning collection, it retains the same core team that has accompanied her as she traversed beyond the genre’s borders. Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, her principal collaborators and co‑producers since Golden Hour, return in major roles here, even as early partner Luke Laird rejoins. A steady procession of veteran pedal steel players appears, but so do Golden Hour contributors like Todd Lombardo and Shawn Everett, along with “Espresso” co‑writer Steph Jones. The first track featuring banjo also marks her first with a dance beat.

In other words, this shift in palette is mostly packaging: the same Kacey, with a different sonic surface. Those soft, crystalline vocal textures; the meticulously crafted easy‑listening arrangements; the delicate balance between tender empathy, sharp wit, and a touch of bohemian philosophy. Despite the costume changes, her unmistakable voice and persona remain the compass that has steered her through a series of musical explorations. What makes Middle Of Nowhere compelling isn’t merely that it tints Deeper Well with a drier, more intimate palette and plunges Musgraves back into archetypes that please purists. It’s that this stylistic re‑scening seems to have reawakened her songwriting.

Overall, this material represents Musgraves at her most animated, arresting, and mischievously smart in years — a record that feels more assured, affecting, and genuinely enjoyable than I expected after the detour of Deeper Well. The album reveals greater stylistic breadth than the surface country branding suggests, and those varying tones mesh more naturally than some of the twists in star‑crossed. It’s a collection where the country‑western narrative of “Back On The Wagon” and the Fleetwood Mac pastiche “Rhinestoned” both land, aided by inventive touches like a waltz‑time lift in the “Middle Of Nowhere” chorus or the whispered punctuation in the climactic vocal of “Abilene.”

The tonal range of these tracks complements one another. On songs like “Coyote,” “Hell On Me,” and “Uncertain, TX,” Musgraves revisits past heartbreak from multiple angles, attempting to parse what happened. Elsewhere, she offers a more multifaceted view of her current solitary life. The engagement‑averse, “Dry Spell,” is tempered by “Loneliest Girl,” a Golden Hour‑evoking tune in which Musgraves relishes her independence from drama: “I don’t have to deal with anyone’s melodrama / I don’t have to pretend to like your friends or your mother / I don’t have to shoulder your childhood traumas / I’m content to be the loneliest girl in the world.” And with “Mexico Honey,” she tentatively tests the dating landscape again.

Occasionally a lyric clang breaks through. I still wrestle with whether the controversial line from “Dry Spell,” “Lonely with a capital H,” is a bold provocation or a mere stunt, and I squirm at the moment when she half‑raps in “Mexico Honey,” “We’re getting wine‑drunk, spinning Daft Punk.” But for the most part her wordplay keeps pace with her melodic facility. Even as the focus is on the trials and triumphs of single life, there’s space for detours like the slyly defiant “Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy,” a slow‑burner that mocks cosplay cowboys whose boots have never known dirt.

That particular track pairs Musgraves with bluegrass crossover star Billy Strings, though he mostly stays out of the way. Indie‑folk singer Gregory Alan Isakov sits back on “Coyote,” a midnight‑colored ballad echoing her Frozen 2 appearance as she reckons with a fearful ex. Even her old ally Willie Nelson gets a modest moment on “Uncertain, TX,” named for a real place that serves her narrative well: “The town I currently inhabit is barely on the map; it sits somewhere in confusion.” When it comes to guests, the centerpiece is Musgraves’ longtime rival Miranda Lambert, with whom she finds common ground on the campy, Mariachi‑tinged duet “Horses & Divorces.” It might not be a Drakes‑Kendricks moment, but for country fans it reads as a symbolic rapprochement.

Middle Of Nowhere is brimming with such finds. It feels like a homecoming, yet not in the most predictable sense. Rather than pulling Musgraves back into strict genre borders, the album reminds us of all the ways she can flourish when inspiration strikes. It’s as if she recalled what she does best — and, more to the point, all the things she does well — and deliberately set out to reclaim her position as a leading figure on the pop‑country boundary. I’m not certain another Musgraves record will captivate me as deeply as Golden Hour did, but Middle Of Nowhere is the strongest contender since then.

Middle Of Nowhere lands May 1 on Lost Highway.