Kacey Musgraves’s third taping for Austin City Limits, which took place in June for an episode that will be the show’s fiftieth-season premiere when it airs Saturday, was a looser affair than most, despite the Golden, Texas, native complaining about the difficulty of sitting down in her restrictive, sequined minidress. Though her episode is one of the few to feature a single artist for the show’s full hour, Musgraves and her band took more than two hours to get through their set, retaking songs, retuning guitars, and generally revealing, as the singer put it at one point, “how the sausage gets made.”
From another artist, the process might have come off as sloppy. But from Musgraves, especially at this point in her career, it played less like messiness and more like the authenticity that’s propelled the last several years of her career: Musgraves, it seems, is simply uninterested in—maybe even incapable of—being anything other than herself.
That’s a choice, and it can come with costs. When she debuted in 2013 with Same Trailer, Different Park, Musgraves, now 35, was a promising young country talent with an ear for pop hooks and an uncommon willingness to write lyrics that were both clever and cutting in how they called out hypocrisy and intolerance among many of the very fans who were drawn to the genre. Then, with the 2018 release of Golden Hour, she emerged, as if from a chrysalis, as a capital-A Artist, pushing the form of country music forward. The album featured songs that evoked the wide-open spaces of her native East Texas in their lush production, and ones that captured the swell of new love in the simple melody of a plucked banjo. It pursued an expansive vision of genre that made robotic voices and disco beats feel like elements of country music so timeless you could almost believe that Hank done it that way.
In a rare feat for an artist who bucked the path Nashville set her on, Musgraves was rewarded critically and commercially for the choice to follow her muse: Golden Hour became her best-selling album and was universally acclaimed, earning her the Grammy for Album of the Year and all the creative freedom an artist could dream of. It maintains its cachet six years later—in May, when Apple Music released its list of the 100 best albums ever recorded, Golden Hour placed at 85, ahead of classics by AC/DC, the Eagles, and Nina Simone. The album’s 2018 success served as a reminder that Musgraves was both an artist with a legacy and one who perpetually ran the risk of having peaked before her thirtieth birthday.
With her next project, 2021’s Star-Crossed, Musgraves delivered very little of what made fans fall in love with Golden Hour. The album was claustrophobic and tense, full of songs about divorce and self-doubt. An artist who wanted to stay on the “superstar” track Golden Hour offered might have made different decisions around a follow-up. Love songs have universal appeal; divorce songs, not so much. With Star-crossed, Musgraves asked listeners to dance to a disco-country tune about her ex-husband’s insecurities and nod their heads to a contemplative song about her highly specific attempts to be a good wife in a marriage that circled the drain. She toured arenas in support of the album, but she didn’t always sell them out.
Last year offered Musgraves a bit of a reset. She enjoyed the biggest hit of her career, the Zach Bryan duet “I Remember Everything,” which became her first song to top Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. It came on the heels of duets with bedroom pop artist Cuco and singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, all three of which put her in front of new audiences.
Her LP Deeper Well, released in March, wasn’t a calculated attempt to build on those successes, though. She didn’t ask Bryan to return the favor with another duet, or chase the pop sound she’d explored with Cuco and Kahan. Instead, she chose to go off trend, making a record more influenced by Simon & Garfunkel and early Bob Dylan than anything on the radio in 2024. The album is wonderful, and creatively, it seems to be the right choice for Musgraves. But a musician determined to fill those arenas for an upcoming fall tour might have tried harder to capitalize on recent chart success.
Performing on the Austin City Limits stage, Musgraves and her band (a seven-piece unit that, on several songs, featured as many as four guitarists at a time) made idiosyncratic choices throughout the night. They emerged to a swirl of smoke and a baffling choice of entrance music: “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold,” a mournful dirge inspired by Gregorian chant with lyrics by J.R.R. Tolkien that was recorded for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. At times, it was hard to tell if Musgraves was messing with the audience. Before retaking “Too Good to Be True” because of a guitar issue, she asked the crowd to “go crazy” on the second go-round so that the television audience would assume the song was particularly beloved in Austin. She talked a lot from the stage during the taping, breaking up the set with anecdotes about her hometown of Golden and her pre-Nashville days working in an office park near the Austin airport.
A career-focused artist would probably be mindful of her brand and how to shape it for maximum appeal (imagine Taylor Swift taking the stage to music from The Hobbit!), but at this point, coming off the biggest single in her career and six years removed from Golden Hour, it’s clear that when Musgraves sees a path toward superstardom ahead of her, she usually swerves left.
She’s been doing that in subtle ways for years, but I didn’t have a theory about why until the ACL taping. Now I get the sense that Musgraves is deeply uncomfortable with performing in a way that feels dishonest. If you saw her play the song “Golden Hour” at pretty much any point after her divorce from singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, you probably heard her change the song’s final romantic sigh from a breathy delivery of the words “golden hour” to a lewd “golden shower,” making a teenager’s sex joke out of one of the loveliest moments in her catalog—and one that almost certainly means something to many in the audience. There are songs on Deeper Well that are about a fella who’s no longer in the picture, too, and she’s undercut those as well.
On “Giver / Taker,” a melancholy tune about fumbling toward a lover, she sings a final chorus: “I would give you everything that you wanted / And I would never ask for any of it back / And if I could take only as much as I needed / I would take everything you had.” Live, she punctuated that last line with a bitter “every last f—ing thing.” On “Dinner With Friends,” a Deeper Well track that reads like a gratitude journal (the song, she explained during one of her speaking interludes, was inspired by Nora Ephron’s “What I Will Miss” list, written while the author was dying of cancer), she sings, “He loves me in all of the ways that I never felt love before.” At the show, she ad-libbed, immediately lamenting, “Or so I thought; I was wrong.”
Audiences don’t demand these things of a performer. The parasocial relationship between artist and fan works best when the listener has blanks to fill in with their own imagination. We prefer to make our own meaning of the songs we care about rather than be told how to feel by the artist. Graham Nash didn’t need to clarify that the house he and Joni Mitchell shared was no longer a very, very, very fine house after their breakup. But Musgraves seems to have an allergy to going through the motions. Taylor Swift wrote “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” about her ability to plaster on a smile and nail the show every night no matter what’s going on in her life; Musgraves seems more willing to let the audience see her cry. There’s a limit to just how famous you can get when you present yourself as someone who makes mistakes.
An interesting tension exists between the loose, casual demeanor Musgraves has when she’s improvising her way through extended stage banter and her commitment to the work itself. During the taping, she asked the audience to sit for rerecordings of not just “Too Good to Be True,” but also “The Architect,” “Breadwinner,” and “High Horse.” She may undercut her songs so she can get through them without feeling dishonest, but she also cares enough about them that she’ll pause the show to rerecord one if the third guitar didn’t sound quite right.
That tension exists throughout her work, and it explains a lot. Certainly, an artist who jumped from playing theaters to playing arenas after a creative breakthrough could follow a path that would lead to full stadiums for her next tour. But what makes Musgraves so special is that she seems willing to make choices that limit how high she can climb the Spotify charts as long as those choices feel right to her. Following her arrow wherever it points has served Musgraves well so far, and in her performance for the high-pressure taping of a historic episode of the storied Austin City Limits, she seemed more determined than ever to keep doing exactly that.
