Day 402: Kacey Musgraves – Pageant Material
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Kacey Musgraves is one of the best artists I’ve discovered during this project. She’s one of my most frequently listened to acts on this website, and there’s only one studio album that I haven’t listened to during this project (if you don’t count her Christmas album, and if it’s not December I don’t count it) so I thought today could be the perfect day to listen to her second album, Pageant Material.
Album cover courtesy of Mercury Nashville
Pageant Material was released in 2015 as a follow-up to her debut, Same Trailer Different Park, and it features her recorded live with a small band consisting of her touring band and some session musicians, as well as a string section which was added later. It was co-written and co-produced by her and her frequent collaborators Luke Laird and Shane McAnally. It debuted at number three on the US Billboard 200 and reached the top of the country albums chart in the UK, and it was nominated for Best Country Album at the 58th Grammy Awards.
I’ve never heard a Kacey Musgraves album that I didn’t like, and Pageant Material continues that streak. It feels like the necessary bridge between the more traditional country style of her earlier work and the more unique cross-genre music she became known for later in her career – sonically, it’s very much traditional guitar-heavy singer-songwriter country music with a bit of banjo and pedal steel, but you can hear some whispers of what she did on her next album, Golden Hour, especially lyrically.
This feels like the album where she’s honing her writing and it’s not yet at the level where she is on Golden Hour, but you can see how she got there – there’s the same dry humour and similar topics of love, small town life and her musings on how to live well, which is very much her on her home turf. However, on this album she hadn’t perfected her very unique style yet, her writing isn’t as sharp as it gets later on, but it’s not far off either.
It’s not my favourite Kacey Musgraves album by a country mile, but it’s still a perfectly enjoyable record. I liked “Late to the Party”, “Somebody to Love” and “Die Fun”, the latter of which is probably my favourite, as it’s a little different and it’s veering a bit more into the more unique country-hybrid direction that she later perfected. I’m giving this one a 7.5/10, not her best but by no means bad.