It’s time to recruit Kacey Musgraves back to Austin. No slight to Nashville, it’s just that Kacey is a more natural fit in the capital city of her home state. She is one of us. It’s time to come home with the Armadillo and rule the city alongside Willie Nelson and Matthew McConnaughy.
Austin has a perplexingly antagonistic attitude towards newcomers, but that’s okay because Kacey boasts a ‘locals resume’ that will shut up even the most vocal curmudgeons. She wouldn’t be moving to Austin, she’d be moving back to Austin. Kacey Musgraves might be the girl from Golden, but as soon as she graduated high school in 2006 she hightailed it to the city of the violet crown.
She was an unknown teenager when she arrived, she hadn’t even been booked as a contestant on Nashville Star yet, and Austin has charted every step of her career. In the early days, she played a show at Threadgill’s. On a Wednesday night. And split the bill with Shinyribs. For a five dollar cover charge. Being booked by Eddie Wilson (founder of Armadillo World Headquarters) to play a five dollar show with a local legend is as vintage Austin as you can get, and a feather in any musician’s cap.
Fast forward to 2013 when Kacey released her debut album, “Same Trailer, Different Park.” It’s a witty album, and an outspoken Kacey Musgraves left a lot of country music fans confused why this girl played traditional music but was singing about rolling joints and telling kids it was okay to be gay. Austin got it, and we invited her to christen the new amphitheater at Circuit of Americas. She opened for Kenny Chessney, so truly was the first one to play the stage.
“Same Trailer, Different Park” put her on the radar, but she was still hustling to build a fanbase. She joined Dale Watson for her first taping of an ACL episode and local music journalist Michael Corcoran encouraged folks to go, not because of the can’t miss performance, but since neither artist was “huge” it was “as good a chance as any to get in for a free TV show.” There was a lot more buzz by the end of the year when she tied Taylor Swift for the most nominations (six) at the CMA Awards and won the trophy for Newcomer of the Year. Swift and Musgraves went head to head again at the Grammys, with Kacey coming out on top for Country Album of the Year.
In 2015, Musgraves was celebrating the release of her second album and spending a lot of time in Austin with her BFF Willie Nelson. She performed at his Fourth of July picnic and then joined him again for a three day New Year’s Eve extravaganza at the ACL Live Theater. The two also met up at the White Horse, a funky East Austin honky-tonk, to record a music video of Kacey performing a song Willie wrote in 1965.
Her first two albums were wildly successful, but it was the release of Golden Hour in 2018 that transformed Kacey from a rising star into a supernova. The album debuted at number four on the Billboard charts and the trajectory only went up from there. It took home four Grammy awards, including the coveted album of the year, and was ranked number 270 on Rolling Stone’s 2020 list of greatest albums of all time. Prior to the release, she was playing the opening slot for John Prine, but after she was selling out arenas on a headlining world tour. Kacey brought the party to Austin and performed two sold out shows at Stubb’s before returning for the ACL Fest where she performed the songs from Golden Hour as the sun set over the festival grounds.
Kacey Musgraves has followed an eerily similar path to Willie Nelson. She’s paid her dues in Nashville and produced a solid catalog of hits that establish hers as one of the premier songwriters of her generation, but she doesn’t fit in with the other country stars. In fact, she seems to enjoy pissing them off, usually with a snarky comment that hollows out any defense they could muster. On her most recent album she croons,“My home state of Texas / The sky there, the horses and dogs / But none of their laws.” That’s basically the official Austin motto! It’s time to follow in the steps of her good friend and come home to Austin and claim the title of weirdo in chief.
