Kacey Musgraves Drives Toward ‘Middle of Nowhere’ on First Lost Highway Album

Kacey Musgraves has a new album finished, and it puts her on a label with a very specific history. Middle of Nowhere, her seventh major-label LP, will arrive as her first for Lost Highway Records. The imprint, revived after years of dormancy, was once home to records that redrew country’s boundaries without making a fuss about it. That context matters here.

The album contains 13 songs and draws heavily on the textures of Texas country, the stuff with deep roots in red dirt and Bakersfield. The title track reportedly opens with acoustic guitar and Musgraves’ vocal alone before the full band pushes the song between a straight groove and a waltz. People who have heard it mention Buck Owens as a reference point, not as pastiche but as a structural echo.

“Uncertain, TX” is one of the song titles floating around. It points to the record’s larger concern with small places and what it means to stay in them. Musgraves has spent years playing with the friction between wide-open ambition and the quiet of rural stillness. This album sounds like she’s leaning harder into the second half of that equation.

Coming after a stretch of records that chased bigger pop structures, the move to Lost Highway looks intentional. No grand statements have been made about release dates yet. But the title alone suggests a record more interested in arriving somewhere specific than in covering a lot of ground.