Daniel Shea/FADERKacey Musgraves isn't necessarily loving the state of country music right now.
In a new interview with FADER's June/July issue, the 26-year-old "Merry 'Go Round" singer opens up about some problems she has with the genre and some of its current top stars.
FADER notes that Kacey's upcoming album title, Pageant Material, is at least in part "a reference to criticism over a bored-looking frown she was caught making on camera" when she lost to Miranda Lambert for Female Vocalist of the Year at the 2013 CMA Awards.
This album title is ironic, Kacey notes, because she doesn't feel like she fits into that Pageant Material mold. "Especially for women, you need a certain face at award shows when you lose or you're an a--hole," she tells FADER. "You can't have a potty mouth or an opinion. In the South, getting judged on superficial stuff is a real thing. And I'm not attacking the people that might get something positive out of pageantry; I'm just not into being judged in that way."
That's not the only issue Kacey's had with commercial country music in recent years. "There was this cycle in Nashville where if you were a girl, you had to be really sassy: ‘You cheated on me, so I'm going to burn your house down,'" she tells the mag, which notes she's seemingly referring to Miranda again and also Carrie Underwood, both famous for their take-down-the-cheater chart toppers. "I've never felt a kinship to those kinds of songs"
"The more country that my music gets, the less it fits into the country world today," Kacey admits. "It's almost like there needs to be two genres, modern country and...country?"
There's a lyric from a song called "Good Ol' Boys" on Kacey's new album that goes: "Another gear in a big machine don't sound like good to me." FADER notes this is a reference to Nashville's Big Machine, the label built around Taylor Swift's success, but Kacey insists, "I'm talking about a lot of different people."
"Any industry has its shoo-ins and people that get in because they know somebody, or their dad worked here, whatever," she says. "But, yeah, there is a wink."
Not to worry, though—Taylor's said goodbye to country and gone full-pop, and Kacey's not lusting after her kind of success anyway. "The idea of massive amounts of fame—having my face on Walgreens end-caps and pizza boxes—I don't fantasize about that," Kacey tells FADER. "Do I want to be comfortable, to live my life however I want within reason? Yeah. But I'm happy with just being a songwriter. I'd rather have smaller numbers [of fans] that are really into what I'm doing than a massive amount of people that don't really know what I'm about."
Kacey's album Pageant Material is set for a June 23 release.