NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
It is mid-morning in Nashville and Kacey Musgraves is padding around her new home, looking in the fridge and checking on her dogs while she talks. She moved in in April, after spending a year having it renovated. From what I can see on Zoom, the results of her renovations are exceptionally tasteful, in a very up market boutique hotel way: everything – walls, furniture, the floor – seems to be in shades of muted, natural off-white. As with the breakfast she’s just finished – which involved a very specific kind of rosemary sourdough, an equally specific kind of slow-cultured, grass-fed butter “from this place in Atlanta” and a “pretty fucked-up” Japanese machine that steams bread – it seems to suggest someone doing very well for themselves, which indeed Musgraves is.
In 2018, her fourth album, Golden Hour, finally broke through, fulfilling the line about her that people had used from the start: “The country star for people who hate country music.” It went platinum in the US, made the top 10 in the UK, topped umpteen end-of-year critics’ lists and won four Grammys, including album of the year. It’s not unknown for a country artist to receive the latter award – the [Dixie] Chicks won it in 2007, as did Taylor Swift in the days when she was still country’s brightest young star rather than an all-conquering pop behemoth, and Glen Campbell in 1969 – but it doesn’t happen often.
Even the Nashville music business establishment, which has occasionally given the impression of viewing the left-leaning Musgraves as a thorn in its side rather than a bright new star, felt impelled to laud its success:
