Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer, Different park

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent album

I tried this debut album by Kacey Musgraves because it has created a considerable stir in the USA and is attracting a lot of attention here, too. I'm delighted that I did because it is excellent and well worth all the fuss made of it.

Musgraves has created a country album of very good songs with lovely, singable tunes, nice harmonies and a good variety of moods. She has a fine voice, she can put a song across very well and her band are excellent - solid, sensitive and restrained much of the time which lends more power to the songs than over-the-top performance and production.

What really makes this album stand out, though, is Musgraves' lyrics. There are a number of reasonably conventional love songs and lamentations of a broken heart, all well done and enjoyable, but she also thoroughly subverts most of the attitudes inherent in much country music. She sings of the hypocrisy and small-minded bitchiness of small town life. I truly admire the guts and independence of mind it must have taken for a young Texas woman to write country songs with lines like:
"It don't matter if you don't believe,
Come Sunday morning you'd better be there in the front row
Like you're supposed to..."
(in the excellent Merry-Go-Round), or for her to write a song about wanting uncommitted sex in It Is What It Is (which her grandmother apparently insists on calling The Slut Song) which, if written and sung by a man would raise few eyebrows but quietly and brilliantly undermines the hypocrisy in attitudes to women and sex.

I especially like that Musgraves somehow manages to do all this with a wit and a warmth of heart which means that the album is anything but a prickly polemic and is a pleasure to listen to. I laughed out loud when I first heard the opening of the fabulous Follow Your Arrow:
"If you save yourself for marriage you're a bore;
You don't save yourself for marriage you're a who-o-o-rrible person..."
which is beautifully delivered and works perfectly in a Texan accent. It's a great song and there are others on the album which are just as good.

A few people really stand out from the slew of quite good country/Americana recordings at the moment. Kacey Musgraves is one of them. I think this is a terrific album and recommend it very warmly indeed.