Stream Kacey Musgraves’ Brilliant Debut Album ‘Same Trailer Different Park’

Sam Lansky | March 19, 2013 8:26 am

Same Trailer Different Park, the debut album from country singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves, is easily the best thing you’ll hear this week. On the back of lead single “Merry Go ‘Round,” a dazzling portrait of small-town insularity that packs the unromantic compassion of an entire season of Friday Night Lights into one three-minute pop song, Musgraves’ first LP is quietly self-assured and breathtaking in its clear-eyed, unsentimental storytelling. More than her direct contemporaries in the mainstream country scene like Taylor Swift and Miranda Lambert, Musgraves evokes a handful of underrated alt-folk singer-songwriters from the last decade — Kasey Chambers and Kathleen Edwards, namely — with a finely honed pop sensibility and a keen knack for detail.

Much has already been made of Musgraves’ grit and progressivism, which are relatively anomalous in the conservative space of country radio, but aside from the lightly inspirational leftist stomp of “Follow Your Arrow,” there’s so much to love here that’s more personal than political: The withering regret of “Stupid,” especially, and the devastating “It Is What It Is,” which is probably the best song written about a one-night stand since Liz Phair‘s “Fuck and Run.” It’s all just so good — so don’t sleep on it. Stream the album in full at NPR, then go buy it on iTunes.