One of the most crucial events in recent country music happened not in a recording studio, on a stage or at an awards show. It happened at a co-writing session in 2012 when Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally were working on a song called "Follow Your Arrow." They came up with a bouncy, catchy chorus with these lyrics: "Make lots of noise and kiss lots of boys / Or kiss lots of girls if that's something you're into / When the straight and narrow gets a little too straight / Roll up a joint, or don't, just follow your arrow."
That in itself was not so unusual. Nashville songwriters are always coming up with funny lyrics about sex and drugs. But after they're done laughing, they usually take the references out, for fear of offending someone on country radio or on the puritan right. Double entendres and the glorification of guns and alcohol are fine, but gay sex, illegal drugs and non-church-going (also in the lyrics) are taboo.
What made this writing session so different was that Musgraves, Clark and McAnally never considered taking those references out. Not because Clark and McAnally are out-of-the-closet gays, but because all three are from small towns and know what really goes on beneath the surface there. If you're trying to capture what really goes on in such towns, you have to include such details. They left the lyrics as they were not to make a point but to write a stronger song.
"When that line about kissing girls came out," Musgraves recalls, "I kept it because it made sense to me, and it made the song better. It's a song about following your arrow wherever it might take you, and that should include all kinds of people. You can't write a song like that and leave out some kinds of people just because some other people might object."
It wasn't the subject matter per se that made "Follow Your Arrow" such an important breakthrough. After all, there have been a lot of mediocre songs about drugs and homosexuality. What was important was the attitude that the writers weren't going to shy away from reality, that to write a good country song in the 2010s, you can't rely on past certainties but have to wrestle with American life in all its contradictions and ironies. You need that — that and a good chorus melody.
"Somewhere along the way I lost that internal censor," Musgraves adds. "I've never felt the need to hold back anything I want to say. I always thought the point of art and songwriting is to make you think and push boundaries. That's why it was such a treat to find this group of songwriters who were unrestrained by any conservative constraints. Anytime I wanted to say something in a song and I'd wonder, 'Can I say that?' they'd say, 'Yeah, why can't we say it?' "
Why not indeed? Same Trailer Different Park, Musgraves' first nationally distributed album, topped Billboard's Top Country Albums chart, rose to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and yielded three Top 40 country singles. In the 2013 Country Music Critics' Poll, Musgraves won for Best Album, Best Female Vocalist, Best New Act and Artist of the Year. She came in second to her good friend Clark as Best Songwriter, while Clark came in second for Best Album and Best New Artist.
Musgraves and Clark were welcome answers to country music critics' oft-published calls for artists who would tackle the genre's traditional themes — marriage, work, family, sex, intoxication and small-town life — with vigorous realism rather than lazy clichés. From the rural drawl in their voices to the resonant twang of their guitar hooks, it's clear that these two women are playing country music, but they aren't playing by the same old rules. There's a fearlessness in their writing that puts the iconoclasm of most indie rockers to shame. Musgraves and Clark seem to believe that if they write honestly and evocatively about American small-town life, the people who live there will respond.
"I feel if you write what you want to say," Musgraves says, "the rest will come later. I don't want to make music that's tailored for radio. I want to make music and hope that radio will like it. There's no doubt that I am a country artist, but it doesn't mean that I have to stick to the same formula. I think it's great if you can walk the line between art and commercialism, but honestly, I just wanted to make a great record."
After graduating from high school in East Texas and spending a short spell in Austin, Musgraves was in Nashville for good by the age of 20. Before long she signed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music and went looking for like-minded songwriters. A mutual friend, Ashley Arrison, introduced Musgraves to McAnally, and the latter two co-wrote two songs that first night. McAnally told her, "You've got to meet this girl Brandy Clark," and Musgraves told McAnally, "You've got to meet this guy Luke Laird." Josh Osborne, Jessie Jo Dillon and Mark Stephen Jones joined the circle, and in various combinations, this group wrote most of the songs on Same Trailer, Different Park and Clark's 12 Stories.
"I'm happy to be in this time period," Musgraves says. "There's good music being made out there; it's just a challenge to get it heard. Brandy Clark's new record is so smart and so fresh. The new records by Ashley Monroe and Caitlin Rose are really strong. For a while it was about being pretty and having a big voice, but I think it's swinging back to substance. There's something so amazingly real about the country music that I love, of being unafraid to say what's really going on, real people going through real issues, trying to feed their kids and going through addictions and divorce. I love it when people are willing to sing about that, because it's a part of every family's life."
Perhaps the most surprising song on Same Trailer, Different Park is the final track, "It Is What It Is," which was written by Musgraves, Clark and Laird. It's the monologue of a woman who has lost all her romantic illusions and proposes to a man with a world-weary pragmatism that they sleep together until they find something better. We recognize the feeling as something that we've spotted in our friends — or perhaps have felt ourselves. We know it's an unarguably true confession, but it seems to flout the expectations of country music more than all the mentions of dope smokers, lesbians and agnostics that have preceded it.
The track benefits from Musgraves' conversational, unaffected but pleasurably tuneful vocal. But the song is so well constructed that it could be effective coming from any singer who commits to the story. And it's that quality of songwriting — a combination of consummate craft and an unflinching attention to life as it's actually lived — that recalls a previous renaissance in country music: the era when Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle and Guy Clark similarly expanded the boundaries of country music.
"Emmylou is a role model in the sense that she values the song," Musgraves says. "She was able to be sexy and hold her own in the music world and also have an intelligent brain. She was also able to have a long career, because she was never about the fastest track to success. She wasn't a flash in the pan; she built something really solid. The production was also great, but she was all about the song. If you have the song, everything else will follow.
"You can have a great voice, a great look and a great producer, but if you don't have the right song, your records will be forgotten. There are hits that aren't great songs, but will they stand the test of time? To me a good song is a good song now and also 50 years from now. When I sang those Jimmie Rodgers songs as a kid, they were still good songs long after he was gone. Oh my gosh, Hank Williams is a great example. I don't think he ever thought about constraints; it was all pure emotion, so honest."
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