I first heard Kacey Musgraves on the radio driving home from
the place I like to call Stoke. My drives to the supermarket / back to
Leicester are the only trips I make around the Stoke-on-Trent area. Having a
car is supposed to give you freedom, well when you're in an area such as Stoke
you don't want that freedom, just the radio to keep you occupied from the
Poundland-esque high street shops and the terrible road infrastructure. When
I'm not listening to one of my CD-Rs, I like to listen to BBC Radio Four. It's
the best radio station in the UK for news, comedy and music. Usually the music
is backed by interviews in the plenty and lots of information. So I'm driving
in Stoke alongside the gauging waste incinerator and suddenly Kacey Musgraves
takes over the radio - cue the country music drive home through rural England.
Hearing the host talk about a 'modern country
singer-songwriter from Texas' made me sceptical, but when describing her final
track "Follow Your Arrow" as: "The slut song," well,
knowing Texas and knowing how conservative and religious the populous is there,
it made sense to check out her label debut and fourth album, Same Trailer
Different Park.
The aforementioned track is something out of the ordinary
for country. It opens with Musgraves singing: "If you save yourself for
marriage you're a bore. If you don't save yourself for marriage you're a
horrible person," with emphasis on that final 'horrible'. She goes on to
sing: "If you can't lose the weight then you're just fat. But if you lose
too much then you're on crack." / "If you don't go to church you'll
go to hell. If you're the first one on the front row you're a self-righteous
son-of -a-" With "Follow Your Arrow", Musgraves is alienating
her country fan base, but she's not hitting the norm hard enough in my opinion.
She's not a fighter offering an answer, but a musician offering an opinion. As
third track "Merry Go' Round" says: "If you ain't got two kids
by 21, you're probably gonna die alone least that's what tradition told you.
And it don't matter if you don't believe, come Sunday morning, you best be
there in the front row like you're supposed to." Musgraves speaks of the
typical traditional southern traditions of a Catholic and conservative
lifestyle. In her most opinionated track, she sings the most meaningful lyric
on Same Trailer Different Park: "We get bored, so, we get married, just
like dust, we settle in this town."
Musgraves isn't anti-religion or pro-drugs, she just offers
up that choice for people. It's not the punk attitude you feel with
singer-songwriters in the alternative country genre, like Andrew Jackson Jihad
or Wilco. She's the small town rebel girl appealing to other small town rebel
girls. Her lyrical content is far from loveable or danceable country that my
Grandma would enjoy. Tracks like "Silver Lining" and "My
House" are thinking tracks. Same Trailer Different Park is filled with
soft lyricism and repetitive structures. Some may say, 'yeah, this is country',
but I'd like to think theirs variation even in the most straight forward of
genres. From "I Miss You", "Dandelion" and "Blowin'
Smoke", it just shows how Musgraves fails to deliver a decent vocal. Her
patchy delivery isn't helped by a left sided steel guitar and male backing
vocals, which never work in a minimalistic folk, twang way.
Same Trailer Different Park drags on like many modern day
country albums. I can still listen to Johnny Cash albums for hours on end and
never hesitate to stop. It's this repetition of instrumentals and structures
with similar vocals that I can't hack. "Step Off", "Back On The
Map" and "Keep It To Yourself" are more like personal
conversations to an ex, rather than an opinion or source of inspiration which
is what Kacey Musgraves is saying on the tin.
The more I listen to Same Trailer Different Park, the more I
compare Musgraves to an early Taylor Swift. Teenage at heart, country pop by pen. "Follow Your Arrow" is the defining track, however it comes
so late. Her refusal of conservatism and religious traditions are accepted
obviously, but what she's doing is actually offering up a choice that she
actually hasn't made with this album. She doesn't purposely deject
conservatism, or the sedentary lifestyle of Texans in the south. Musgraves
sounds too obsessed with being the bad girl to think about what topics she's
actually singing about. Name dropping weed and crack may get you brownie points with the
southern rebels, but it won't score you well with the country fans, the serious
musicians and the followers of music with deeper meaning. Music shouldn't be confined
to its roots, and I’m afraid Musgraves Same Trailer Different Park is deeply
planted. She sings about opposing traditions, but her music is the country
tradition. There's no variation in structure, vocals or instrumentation.
Tradition is boring, and Same Trailer Different Park gives me even more
reasons not to switch on the radio and to listen to my CD-Rs.
~Eddie
4.0
