Kacey Musgraves announced her sixth studio album on March 11, 2026. It is called Middle Of Nowhere, it arrives May 1 via Lost Highway Records, and the lead single tells you exactly where she has been for the past year.
“It’s been a real long 335 days,” she sings in the opening line of Dry Spell. “And the last time, it wasn’t good anyway.”
From there the song unspools into what Billboard described as “the most entertaining string of down-home double entendres for unmet desire in recent country music,” lyrics that include “I’m so lonely, lonely with a capital H if you know what I mean” and “I’ve been sitting on a washing machine / Ain’t nobody’s tool up in my shed.”
The production is bone dry, stripped back to the point where you can almost hear the dust settle between lines, which is either the funniest or most committed piece of sonic thematic unity in recent memory.
The music video, co-directed by Musgraves and Hannah Lux Davis, follows her through a grocery store in which every piece of produce and every product becomes amorous. It has been watched millions of times.
What Is Middle Of Nowhere?
Middle Of Nowhere is Musgraves’ first album since Deeper Well in 2024, which was itself a meditative, wellness-oriented record that glided past some listeners even as it extended her arena-headlining run.
This one sounds, based on the single, the tracklist, the features, and every interview she has given, like a sharp pivot in the opposite direction. Wry, rooted, Texas-forward, and deeply human.
The title came from a sign in Golden, Texas, her tiny hometown in Wood County in the northeastern part of the state.
The sign reads, “Golden, TX: Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” Musgraves found herself there physically and philosophically during the period she was writing the record, spending time on horseback, reconnecting with the flat landscape and its particular silences, and for the first time in her adult life, being entirely alone.
“The bulk of this record was made during the longest single period of my life,” she said in her announcement statement, “and I found that for the first time, it actually felt incredible being alone and existing in a space not defined by anyone else.
I became fascinated with the concept of liminal space, both geographical and emotional.
We don’t linger in these transitional, empty spaces long enough and rush to define where or whatever is next.
I became so at ease with being in the middle of nowhere in many senses and sitting in the un-comfort of the undefined.”
The album was produced by Musgraves alongside her longtime collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, who have worked with her since Golden Hour. Sessions took place across Texas, Tennessee, and Mexico.
The Full Tracklist
Middle Of Nowhere runs 13 tracks. They are:
- Middle Of Nowhere
- 2. Dry Spell
- 3. Back On The Wagon
- 4. I Believe In Ghosts
- 5. Abilene
- 6. Coyote featuring Gregory Alan Isakov
- 7. Loneliest Girl
- 8. Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy featuring Billy Strings
- 9. Horses And Divorces featuring Miranda Lambert
- 10. Uncertain, Texas featuring Willie Nelson
- 11. Rhinestoned
- 12. Mexico Honey
- 13. Hell On Me
The Features And The Stories Behind Them
The feature lineup alone is one of the more compelling assemblages on any country record in recent memory.
Willie Nelson appears on Uncertain, Texas, a real town in East Texas that Musgraves uses as the setting for a song about modern dating’s non-committal culture.
She described it in her NPR interview as a place “where people can never really actually make up their minds,” and cast Nelson specifically as the narrator because she wanted someone with grandfatherly authority to throw shade at what she called transient dating behavior.
“Who better to help throw a little bit of shade to that than everybody’s favorite grandpa Willie Nelson,” she said. “He might even be a great-great-grandpa, but he’s also a gangster.”
Billy Strings features on Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy, which pulls in the bluegrass energy Strings has made his signature and leans into the Western mythology the album’s title already gestures toward.
Gregory Alan Isakov, the Colorado-based folk artist, appears on Coyote, a pairing that fits the album’s interest in arid, border-country atmospherics.
Miranda Lambert on Horses And Divorces is the feature that will generate the most conversation, and Musgraves knew it.
The two artists have a well-documented complicated history that dates back to the early 2010s when Musgraves co-wrote Mama’s Broken Heart, a song she had wanted to release as her own debut single.
Lambert recorded it for her album Four the Record instead, and the fallout, along with a CMA Awards reaction shot that circulated for years, planted the idea of a feud that neither artist formally confirmed or denied.
In the weeks before the album announcement, both Musgraves and Lambert posted to their Instagram Stories with messages that appeared to be directed at each other.
Musgraves wrote, “You knew I’d said some things about you.” Lambert replied on her own account, “Well, I’ve done my fair share of shit talkin’ too.”
Variety described the resulting duet as “a good-naturedly salty, long-time-coming” meeting between two artists who have finally found the humor in their shared history.
What It Sounds Like
Musgraves described Middle Of Nowhere in a press statement as “a sonic love letter to the musical borders of country,” a record that moves between traditional country, Western swing, bluegrass, Norteño, Zydeco, and the regional Mexican sounds she has absorbed from years of spending time south of the border.
She has spoken publicly about living in Mexico and finding the connective tissue between traditional mariachi and American country, both genres built around plain-spoken emotional truth and the kind of instrumentation that lets a lyric breathe.
The album’s sound strategy, as she described it in her NPR interview, involved loading tracks with production and then systematically stripping elements away until only the necessary pieces remained.
The goal was space, physical space, emotional space, the sound of someone who has stopped trying to fill every silence.
“Texas would not be Texas without Mexico,” she said, making the point that the album’s cross-border influences are not additions to a country record but are instead part of what country always was in that part of the world.
The Lost Highway Return
Middle Of Nowhere arrives on Lost Highway Records, the classic Americana imprint that originally signed Musgraves before it was absorbed into the Nashville major label system early in her career.
The label was relaunched as a prestige roots-oriented operation, and Musgraves’ return to it was announced last spring alongside a cover of Hank Williams’ Lost Highway, a piece of symbolic programming that needed no explanation.
She has spent the intervening period building toward this release: a duet with regional Mexican star Carín León on Lost In Translation, a placement of If The World Burns Down on the Netflix series Nobody Wants This, and the Dry Spell rollout, which she preceded by retweeting a year-old post of her own that read, “Is it possible to die from horniness? Asking for a friend.”
Middle Of Nowhere arrives May 1, 2026.
