Why Kacey Musgraves and Sturgill Simpson Are Better Off at Bonnaroo

With Bonnaroo and the CMA Fest overlapping once again this year, most of country music's best and brightest will be too busy appearing at the latter to make it out to Manchester. But not Kacey Musgraves and Sturgill Simpson — two country misfits and critical darlings who will bypass downtown Nashville completely on their way to Bonnaroo, where even as two of the festival's only country acts, they're more likely to feel at home (not to mention make new fans).

Musgraves and Simpson are both creative powerhouses, each with one foot firmly in country but the other elsewhere — pop for Musgraves, who's collaborated with the likes of Loretta Lynn and Katy Perry, and metaphorical outer space for Simpson, whose Metamodern Sounds in Country Music took the top prize in the Scene's 2014 Country Music Critics' Poll.

For Musgraves, acceptance in mainstream country always seems just around the corner. Adored by critics and peers, her 2013 major label debut Same Trailer Different Park reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and earned a Grammy for Best Country Album, but choosing to plant her flag on the side of LGBT equality and pot-smokin' hippies with "Merry Go Round" and "Follow Your Arrow" raised eyebrows on the conservative right. That's not a problem for the free-hugs-friendly Bonnaroo audience — and is more likely a positive — and CMA Fest would likely relegate the singer to the second-tier Riverfront Park or Bud Light stages, where disinterest reigns supreme.

Simpson, on the other hand, admittedly has zero interest in winning over mainstream country fans.

"I'm not sitting in meetings or anything, or going on radio tours," he told the Scene in January. "I'm not sure how much of that world I would function well within."

And really, he's probably doing the holler-and-swaller CMA crowd a favor. Bonnaroovians, on the other hand, are all about cosmic concepts and heightened awareness. So is Simpson.

"Nighttime reading about theology, cosmology and breakthroughs in modern physics and their relationship to a few personal experiences I've had led to most of the songs on the album," he told NPR in 2014, around the time of Metamodern's release. "There have been many socially conscious concept albums. I wanted to make a 'social consciousness' concept album disguised as a country record."

Both of these artists have real-deal country credentials, but that's not really what CMA Fest is about (it's about superstars and TV advertising). Better to turn on tuned-in kids at Bonnaroo.