East Texan Kacey Musgraves Leads Cosmic Kiss-Off at ACL Fest

First, a brief apology to Rounder Records recording artist, onetime Americana Awards nominee, and generally well-respected singer-songwriter dude Ruston Kelly.

Mr. Kelly, I am sorry. The selfless pursuit of music criticism has demanded I mentally role play as you, to better assess the bruising authenticity of my (your) former wife’s recent divorce songs.

Anyway, so there I was – me, Ruston Kelly – at the Honda stage. After somehow getting lost and foolhardily wandering straight to the center-front of my erstwhile soulmate’s Sunday night ACL set, I was trapped by flanks of her most committed fans, soon to be yelling along to lyrics about our misbegotten civil union. And there she was, Kacey, my much more famous ex.

As she emerged to join her vast band from a giant metal heart sculpture – one that soon burst into flames around the time she sang about getting papers signed – I prepared for the most hellish evening of my life (besides, of course, the night I lost my Americana Award). But after the close of “Star-Crossed,” title track to her latest 2021 LP, she moved wordlessly into wistfully peppy spousal inferiority anthem “Good Wife.” Instead of yelling along with the existential discontent Musgraves felt at fulfilling a preordained domestic role, the tiny teenager to my right yelled “Play ‘High Horse’!”

“Oh, that’s right,” I remembered. People basically agree that this new album is a tiny bit mid… y’know, relative to the catalog.

“It’s a beautiful night for depressing songs,” Musgraves remarked, half joking, half apologizing, midway through an opening run of five Star-Crossed tunes – a somewhat heavy-handed framing that inadvertently encapsulated their missing lightness of touch. This is a songwriter who achieves the most when she’s straining the least, her best work arriving at universal truths when she simply follows her arrow and lets her gloriously earnest idioms speak for everyone. In attempting to plumb her (I mean, our) breakup for grand cosmic romantic relatability, she smothers a lot of those quirky “Grandma cried when I pierced my nose” type Kacey-isms.

Thankfully (or, rather un-thankfully, considering I, Ruston Kelly, am trying to move on here) Musgraves’ personality is too massive for her lesser material to stifle it from the stage. Starting her signature off-brand/on-brand vulgar banter by spelling out an audience member’s “C-U-N-T” sign, it wasn’t long before she was sneaking “fuck” into consecutive sentences and telling us to raise middle fingers up (which promptly cut to black on the Jumbotron, perhaps censoring the mentioned Hulu livestream). Even an afternoon trip to BookPeople was not safe from her admission that “apparently, I’m a slut for reading now.” In case anyone was left doubting her East Texas, salt-of-the-earth bona fides, a nail clipper was brought out so Musgraves could slice down her extensions for ease of guitar playing.

“Are these HD cameras?” she asked, pretending to be embarrassed.

But all that paled in excitement to the moment when, after that initial five-song run, Musgraves asked if she could play some Golden Hour songs. “Only for you, Austin,” she sighed. (Though the home-state love is appreciated, this statement sadly does not stand up to touring setlist scrutiny).

Be it the spectral, cosmic kiss-off of “Space Cowboy” or the mellow melancholy of “Lonely Weekend,” these songs – and the absolutely hypnotic, sing-along sway Musgraves’ spotless renditions held over the ACL crowd – actually made me, Ruston Kelly, feel worse than the earlier tracks about why our relationship failed. Nobody coming out of contemporary country has tunes to unite a field like these. And that was before Musgraves dismissed the band for the night’s clear highlight, a solo “Merry Go ‘Round” – an actually depressing song whose stark elegance made the full-moon night all the more beautiful.

Other moments to further pulverize this recent-divorcé’s ego included the live debut of “Keep Looking Up,” which came dedicated to Musgraves’ father; a climactic break when about a million giant balloons flew into the audience during the Anchorman-style flute solo of “There Is A Light;” and the “fuck Ted Cruz” she snuck into the verses of “High Horse.” The quintessential callout totally broke the meter, but was still pretty badass.

And the final nail? A Kacey-oke rendition of “Dreams” that made me, Ruston Kelly, think about how much worse I would feel if I were instead Lindsey Buckingham.