by Michael McCarthy
Last Friday night’s sold out August 28th Kacey Musgraves show at TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts came just shy of two years since I’d last seen her live at TD Garden on September 6th, 2024. The difference is that in 2024, she performed two sold out nights at TD Garden but this time the second date was added and then canceled awfully quick.
Before last Friday night’s show, I had looked at the set list from the first night of the new tour and was surprised to see that she was doing 11 of the 13 songs from her new album Middle of Nowhere. Two years ago, she did the bulk of her Deeper Well album live but the set list for the opening night of the Middle of Nowhere tour did not have her performing a single song from Deeper Well, which I found a bit perplexing because the album performed well and almost everyone in the Garden was singing along when she did those songs two years ago. Still, I’ve been enjoying Middle of Nowhere even if I don’t love it quite as much as Golden Hour and Star-Crossed yet, and I actually like it when artists perform a lot of new songs live. But I suppose part of me was feeling slightly disappointed by the lack of songs from Deeper Well. Actually, what I really missed was songs from the EP Deeper into the Well, which came out approximately five months after Deeper Well on August 2nd 2024. When I saw her on the Deeper Well tour, the EP had only been out for a month. She didn’t perform any of the EP’s songs live and I kind of figured it was because fans hadn’t had much time to learn the songs yet. That said, some of the songs on Deeper into the Well are among her best material in my opinion so I was really hoping that she’d do a few of those songs on this tour. (I would have especially loved to hear the irresistible earworm that is “Ruthless” and the sweet little song that is “Little Sister.”)
She opened the show Friday night with “Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy” from Middle of Nowhere and immediately almost everyone in the sold out crowd stood up. And nobody sat down for the entire show. Oh, sure, you could find one or two people sitting down for a minute here and there in between songs but otherwise everyone in sight was standing up, at least near where I was in Loge 4. But my eyes swept the crowd numerous times throughout the night and that was the extent of the sitting that I saw. Kacey Musgraves might be a country star but if you just saw the crowd dancing you might have thought you were at a discotheque.
One of the night’s biggest surprises for me Friday night was “High Horse,” which has long been my favorite Kacey Musgraves song. The original is easily one of her most danceable songs—a veritable banger—but Friday night’s arrangement stripped it down and added accordion to the mix. It still had a strong beat, but the accordion gave it an almost old-fashioned French flavor that I wasn’t expecting at all. Somehow, it worked. It was a good example of Kacey finding a way to change up a familiar song without stripping away the qualities that made me love it in the first place.
The staging itself was also impressive. The show was performed in the round, with a conveyor-belt-like section running along the edge of the circular stage, allowing Kacey to travel around the arena while she simply stood—or even sat—in place. At another point, she said that it takes a lot of balls to do what she does before she climbed aboard what I can only describe as a pair of enormous silver testicles decked out like silver disco balls and rode them up into the air above the stage while she performed “Rhinestoned.”
There were also showers of sparklers raining down around the circular stage at one point, although one apparently continued burning after the others had gone out. Kacey could see the small fire from where she was standing even though much of the audience couldn’t, and she kept a nervous eye on it while chatting with us until it eventually went out. It made for one of those wonderfully unscripted concert moments that nobody could have planned.
One thing that struck me at the show was that everyone already seemed to know all of the words to all of the new songs, not just the radio singles. That was the case on the Deeper Well tour, too, but you never know when an artists’ fans might stop paying attention to their newer music. By the time most artists are several albums into their careers like Kacey, a lot of them are focused on doing their singles live and you’re lucky if you get to hear three new songs at their concerts. The thing I find interesting is that record labels are always trying to claim that nobody listens to full length albums anymore. Yet at every Kacey concert I go to, everyone always knows the words to all of her new songs. And Kacey isn’t the only artist whose fans are still listening to their new albums from front to back. Earlier this year I saw Lily Allen and Melanie Martinez on their current tours and both women were performing their new albums in full without doing any of their older songs whatsoever. And the people at those shows seemed to know all of the lyrics, too. Maybe people in general tend to focus more on singles than albums these days but there are clearly still a lot of artists whose fans will engage with them for an hour or so at a time. Which makes me happy because I still enjoy listening to full length albums much more than cherry picking singles.
After Middle of Nowhere, the album that was most represented at Kacey’s show Friday night was Golden Hour, her 2018 crossover album that won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards in 2019. At the first night on the tour, Kacey performed five songs from Golden Hour, but at our show we were treated to a sixth, “Rainbow,” which Kacey dedicated to Dolly Parton, displaying photos of Dolly on the circular videoscreen above the stage. I wasn’t a huge Dolly Parton fan but I did really like her and certainly admired her charity work and good nature and, yes, tears poured down my cheeks while Kacey was singing that one. But she didn’t stop there, immediately following it up with a cover of Barry Mann’s “Here You Come Again,” which was famous done by Dolly, who had a number one hit with it. If the title doesn’t sound familiar, you may recognize its famous lyric that goes, “You’re looking better than a body has a right to.” It’s essentially a song from the point of view of a person whose ex suddenly returns and they immediately fall right back under their spell. Not in a creepy way, of course, but the song does have an air of melancholy to it even if it sounds pretty upbeat. Well, I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I cried even harder while she was doing that one. I’m not even entirely sure why. Maybe it was because I was surrounded by other people who were also finding it quite touching? Or maybe it was because that was a song I heard on the radio a lot when I was a little kid and listening to it brought back a lot of childhood memories? But it was a good cry if I do say so myself.
Maybe that’s what I love most about seeing Kacey Musgraves live. I went into TD Garden Friday night exhausted, nursing a brutal headache and wondering if I even had the energy to make it through the show. Less than two hours later, I’d danced, laughed, cried and somehow felt considerably better than I had when I walked through the doors. I may not love Middle of Nowhere quite as much as Golden Hour yet, and there are certainly older songs I would have loved to hear, but none of that seemed particularly important by the end of the night. For the second time in two years, Kacey Musgraves managed to turn an arena concert into something that felt strangely personal and cathartic. Sometimes music really is the best medicine.
Leave a Reply