VARIETY Digital Cover: Kacey Musgraves on Her New Album, Masturbation, Miranda Lambert, Willie Nelson, and More

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In a new cover story for VARIETY, Kacey Musgraves speaks with Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Chris Willman on her new album “Middle of Nowhere,” masturbation, beef with Miranda Lambert, Willie Nelson, her grandmother, and more. 

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Musgraves on her favorite line off of her new album “Middle of Nowhere”:

“I’ve never talked about self-pleasure before,” she says. “So that’s a first for me: ‘Sitting on the washing machine.’ It’s not my grandma’s favorite line, but it’s mine, I guess.”

On if her grandma understands that line from the song “Dry Spell”:

“She does — although she hasn’t seen the video yet,” says Musgraves, referring to the clip’s setting in a supermarket filled with phallic fruit. “I don’t know if she’ll laugh. Actually, in the middle of filming the video, I got a text from my dad that Nana had to be rushed to the hospital: She had a really scary extreme high blood pressure incident. So I had to leave and I was on the call, crying, like, ‘If Nana lives, she’s gonna hate this video!’”

On abstinence and whether having a man around beats a Maytag:

“I feel like most people are trying to convince you how much they’ve got going on in that department, and I just wanted to let people know how little I had going on,” Musgraves says, growing more serious. “It can get really comfortable and easy to stay that way, because you start feeling really protective of bringing transient energy in. Like, ‘I’m really peaceful right now. This may or may not make anything better.’ But then you’re like, ‘Ugh, but I wanna have some fun.’ You really start weighing out: Is it worth it?”

On if she and Miranda Lambert (who appears in a duet with Musgraves on “Middle of Nowhere”) had beef:

“Oh, there was,” Musgraves confirms. “It was grass-fed, grade A. I mean, it’s real and that’s why I love this song, because it’s not coming from some contrived place in a writing room. We’ve come together after years of really, honestly, not being friends. I had this idea one day when I saw her on Instagram, riding one of her horses, and I thought, ‘Well, I guess we have two things in common: horses and divorces.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, that’s a song.’ Then I took it a step further: ‘What if I write it with her? What if it’s a duet? Fuck it, I’m gonna reach out.’ I hadn’t spoken to her in years and was like, ‘Hey, I have this idea. If anybody would get it, it would be you. We’ve had our shit over the years, but this would be really funny.’ And she was like, ‘I’m down.’

“I was like, ‘Look, I’m not trying to be your friend, but we should write this song at least.’ So it was a late addition, the last song added” to the album, which wrapped up in January.

On Willie Nelson:

“He is our favorite Texan, the patriarch of truth in storytelling and everybody’s favorite gangster grandpa,” she says of her longtime pal. “I was like, I want Willie to help me throw a little bit of shade.”

On naming “Middle of Nowhere”:

“I had been going through a breakup and I really needed to feel grounded, and I had all this time and space around me. So I went down there, and someone had put up this sign in the middle of the town which literally said, ‘Golden, Texas: Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.’ It made me laugh, and I was just like, OK, that’s obviously meant to be a little bit self-deprecating, but there was this quiet confidence about it that I really liked.

[Photo Credit: Nino Muñoz for Variety]

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