Ending the Dry Spell
Excellent new albums from Kacey Musgraves and Ella Langley consider exes, Texas, and friendship with Miranda Lambert. Both have generated heat on country radio.
Kacey Musgraves - Middle of Nowhere
I love the new Kacey Musgraves album, which marks a return to the sharp, incisive storytelling of her earliest records, but with the heft of lived experience and accrued wisdom. It’s the funniest she’s been in ages, and finds her expanding her musical palette with some welcome forays into Mexican music. Not for nothing, it’s also a pedal steel lover’s dream. I wrote a rave at FLOOD Magazine:
[On] an album that’s all about living in in-between spaces, it’s appropriate that Musgraves finds inspiration in border towns: tejano and mariachi touchpoints abound, not least in the lonesome accordion that runs through “Horses and Divorces,” a riotous team-up with Miranda Lambert that addresses their tabloid friction with grace and understanding. Musgraves is once again also working with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, the production team that brought psychedelic swirl to her landmark 2018 album Golden Hour. The sound here couldn’t be more different: dusty and dry and clipped to the bone. It’s an arid sonic palette that serves thematic purpose, whether to connect Musgraves back to the outlaw-country heyday (“Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy,” which subverts clichés about finding freedom in solitude) or simply to underscore her very good jokes (in “Dry Spell” she’s “lonely with a capital H,” embracing the proud country tradition of innuendos delivered with cornpone yucks, the parched soundscape reinforcing every punchline).
There are laugh-out-loud lines across the album, but also moments of startling clarity. Of course, the two things are not mutually exclusive: “Back on the Wagon,” about a woman who provides endless second chances to a dubious dude, is cheerfully self-effacing but also has deep rivers of melancholy winding through it. The most aching song of all is “Loneliest Girl,” which boasts about the advantages of singleness, but would trade them all for a shoulder to cry on.
Read the rest here.
My rating: 8.5 out of 10.
Ella Langley - Dandelion
There is ample documentation proving that the country music ecosystem is an unwelcoming place toward women, so it’s important to take the wins whenever they come. Ella Langley is certainly winning: at the time of this writing, her blockbuster single “Choosin’ Texas” is spending its seventh week atop the Billboard Hot 100 while its parent album, Dandelion, reigns over the albums chart. The only other woman who has achieved this particular twofer is Taylor Swift.
This is also a win for listeners, as both the song and the album are terrific. What surprises most about Langley’s unexpected triumph is that the momentum seems derived almost entirely from the quality of the music. Her chart success doesn’t reflect any particular narrative or intersection with the zeitgeist, but rather attests to the enduring appeal of sturdily-constructed country heartache.
It’s telling that Miranda Lambert is listed among the album’s co-producers, a fairly new role for her; Lambert is peerless when it comes to capturing the specifics of rural life in a way that’s universally appealing, to finding surprising emotional depth and nuance in classic country tropes, and to seamlessly incorporating influences spanning the outlaw era and 90s arena country. No wonder she identified Langley as a kindred spirit: Dandelion is winsome for many of the same reasons, a rich and absorbing country record blessed with killer songs, a dynamic singer, and lived-in, live-band production.
Langley’s music sounds simultaneously timeless and state-of-the-art, fitting seamlessly into the current conversation but also sounding like it could have hit at any point in the 1990s or early 2000s. Indeed, a big part of the album’s appeal is in how Langley embraces both the stuff that sounds deeply traditional and the stuff that feels tethered to a very specific moment in time: the album is bookended by brief takes on “Froggy Went A-courtin’,” the folk tune Langley loved as a child, but it also finds space for “You & Me Time,” a slice of beach-country zen that would make Kenny Chesney proud.
Lyrically, Langley flits effortlessly between memoir and genre storytelling. In both cases, she shows facility with imagery and wordplay. The title song uses flowers and weeds to extol the beauty of living wild and free; it’s simple but heartfelt, and Langley populates the song with sweet tribute to growing up in the rural south. “Choosin’ Texas” works on a few different levels: as a playful pile-up of regional particulars and country music in-jokes; as a timeless tale about lost love; and as a more philosophical consideration of losing a lover to the allure of a specific place.
A lot of these songs are just so good— songs that would have announced themselves as hits in any era. My favorite is “Her So Bad,” an intensely-felt song about coveting the life of the woman who seems to have it all together. It’s a trope Lambert has also explored— check “More Like Her,” from the classic Crazy Ex-Girlfriend record— and if Langley doesn’t quite offer the same emotional sophistication, she is fully persuasive in her yearning, percussive chorus: “I just wanna be her so bad, it hurts so bad, it hurts so bad.”
A country singer through and through, Langley chronicles love and heartache and all the stages in between: “Low Lights” conjures romance through sumptuous strings, while “We Know Us” foresees a relationship’s downfall like its premeditated. One of the best songs on the album is “Bottom of Your Boots,” where a lite-disco pulse enlivens a swoon worthy ultimatum: “If you’re gonna love me, better love me to the moon and back/ from the bottom of your boots to the top of your hat.”
Langley also knows how to cut loose and have fun, particularly on a couple of country throwbacks that pop up in the middle of the album. “I Gotta Quit” is a rip-roaring honky tonk tune that could have been a monster hit in the early 90s, while “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” is drenched in steel guitar and country tears.
Dandelion feels like a synthesis of what the sturdiest country blockbusters have sounded like over the past few decades, masterfully executed and with its own perspective. Albums this enjoyable are easy to celebrate, and with any luck will linger on the charts for a while longer.
My rating: 8 out of 10.
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