There isn’t a lot to do in Golden, Texas (population: less than 200). The town where Kacey Musgraves grew up is a lot sleepier than Austin, where she moved at 18 as an aspiring singer-songwriter, and Nashville, where she launched her career and now resides. But while touring the world in support of 2024’s Deeper Well, which chronicles a breakup and the soul-searching it prompted, she found herself gravitating towards Golden, with its slower pace and bigger skies. It was there she saw a sign. (Literally.) “Sometimes you have to do some clearing, and it’s not pretty,” she tells Apple Music. “I was in this period of reevaluating a lot in my personal life, taking a lot of steps back, and spending a lot more time alone. There was a sign that someone had put up in the middle of town that says, Golden, Texas: Somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I was just like, ‘Okay, that has to be a song, first of all.’ It sort of became this aesthetic center and emotional center for this album.” If Deeper Well had Musgraves clearing out that which no longer served her, Middle of Nowhere is the harvest after a fallow season: These songs grew in the space she created for herself—songs that feel, and sound, like home. Though she’s had immense success fusing genres, particularly with 2018’s amply awarded Golden Hour, Middle of Nowhere is her first project to wholeheartedly embrace classic country sounds since her 2013 debut Same Trailer Different Park and its follow-up Pageant Material. “I feel like I’ve made this kind of big circle—I don’t think it was even fully intentional,” she says. “I’m always trying to find ways to pull the traditional country in, because that’s where my heart is, that’s what I grew up with. You catch me on any day, and I could be listening to, like, Dr. Dre, or I could be listening to old, beautiful jazz or mariachi music. There’s all these different flavors, but I’m always looking to bring country along with me in some way.” She did so with slow acoustic fingerpicking, yawning pedal steel, the echo of a guitar lick in an empty dive bar, accordion, and tejano rhythms across Middle of Nowhere, and she invited a select group of peers and idols along for the ride. Billy Strings saddles up for “Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy,” a tribute to the non-posers in dirty boots; Willie Nelson, who Musgraves calls the “patriarch of truth of country music,” joins her for “Uncertain, TX.” Lyrically, Musgraves is at the top of her game and funny as hell, with “Dry Spell”—in which she laments being so “lonely with a capital H” and how there “ain’t nobody’s truck up in my drive”—offering a welcome laugh, as does “Horses and Divorces,” the commiserating duet with Miranda Lambert that winks at their (now-squashed) feud. But even if she’s come full circle, Middle of Nowhere makes one thing clear: She may have left Golden, but this isn’t a return, because she never left country. “Since day one, I’ve had the creative freedom to explore the borders and pull people into country, not leave country,” she explains. “I see it as I’m bringing others to my center; I couldn’t leave it even if I wanted to. But I am more multifaceted than just that. I wouldn’t respect myself—and I don’t know that people would respect me—if I just turned out the same damn thing every time.”