Kacey Musgraves: Same Trailer, Different Tune

That intuition also lead her to choose (formerly independent and now property of Universal Music Group) Lost Highway, home of her idols Ryan Adams, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, as her label. Luke Lewis, the founder, told Musgraves, “I will never fuck with what you do. Even if it fails, you’ll know I gave you the chance to be who you want to be.” She was sold. “The other labels didn’t really get it as much as they did. They’d bring up things like ‘artist development.’ What the hell is that?”

It was the summer before last when Musgraves met Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, both successful songwriters in town who have written for everyone from Lady Antebellum to Eric Church, and eventually became her co-producers and crucial creative partners on Same Trailer. She was paired with Laird for a couple co-writes, and then met McAnally through a friend who said, “You need to meet Shane. He’s so awesome!” He describes their first encounter almost like meeting a soul mate, but where the connection is musical, not romantic. Plus, “I’m from Texas, and I always gel well with Texas people.”

Musgraves wasn’t signed to a label at the time, but both Laird and McAnally felt comfortable latching on to the project regardless of the outcome. “As commercially minded as we are, when we started working with Kacey we knew we were going to have to put that attachment to commercial success aside,” McAnally says. “Because that wasn’t her main goal.”

It was on a trip to Texas where they, along with writers Brandy Clark and Josh Osborne, finished a majority of the songs for the record, including “Merry Go ‘Round.” A friend lent the team a huge ranch in the town of Strawn, which had recently been ravaged by wildfires. “They got so close to the house some of the windows broke,” she recalls. “It was charred for miles, really somber looking.”

A few days before they left, McAnally’s mother had been gossiping about the neighbors. As he recalls it, “She said something about how they’re either selling Mary Kay or Mary Jane. Josh Osborne said to me, ‘That sounds like a song.’” They then realized that the one restaurant in the town was named Mary’s Cafe, and it felt like it was meant to be. They got together with Musgraves and started tossing around ideas, different meanings of the word Mary, talking about the religious and even sociopolitical meanings of the name. It was finished in a matter of hours. “I didn’t think it was a hit. I thought we had just made a little art project,” McAnally says, but when they played it for Laird, he could barely get through the whole thing without starting to cry.

“I got chills,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Is this song as really as good as I think it is?’ I love how conversational she is in her writing. She has that, with just the right amount of poetry in her lyrics.” And that’s exactly the kind of record that Same Trailer is, full of songs delivered in her signature sing-talk tone, mixing driving wit (the doublewide ode “My House”) with kiss offs (“Step Off”) and nods to casual, booze-induced sex (“It Is What It Is”). Like “Merry Go ‘Round” and the free-loving “Follow Your Arrow,” many of the tracks hit topics that would otherwise be taboo in the current state of country music. But like Loretta Lynn’s “Rated X” and “The Pill” and Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues,” in a lot of ways it’s just her refocusing the genre back on the outlaw, the struggle, to where it used to be before it turned into “all trucks and tanlines.” The fact that this message is delivered by a pretty, petite brunette makes it go down a lot easier.