Beneath the big hair

Every Tuesday morning I sit at the kitchen table in my pajamas and click through the daily photos from the Associated Press. Because I work for God’s World News, I usually pass over news items of personal interest in favor of the kid-friendly: shipwrecks, dinosaur finds, cuddly zoo animals, volcanoes. But one morning in early November, during my dino-orangutan-lava quest, my eyes fell upon a singular photograph taken at the Country Music Assoication Awards. I clicked on it because I can’t resist a good country music gala—the women posing in fabulous gowns, such an intriguing mix of down-home storytelling and televised glitz. This particular photograph was, if not a volcano, at least volcanic. It was singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves, and her hair was enormous. I read later in an article full of exclamation points that the twenty-something had styled her huge, nut-brown hive as a tribute to Loretta Lynn. And all because of her hair, I looked Musgraves up and started listening to her music.

I was late to the party, as Musgraves is already quite famous. But unless you’re invited to the CMAs, musical connection isn’t much of a party these days anyway. Exposure to music tends to happen solo and is based mostly on personal preference. I, for example, was bent over the bathtub scrubbing when Musgraves’ lyrics started piping privately into my earbuds:

Who needs a house up on the hill when you can have one on four wheels That takes you anywhere the wind might blow—

As it turned out, her songs were as memorable as her hairdo. Like many country artists, she writes and sings out of a genuine sense of place. Unlike many, she is painfully personal and always turns her phrases and melodies shrewdly. You can’t predict her rhymes, or her metaphors, or her thoughts. But there is one part of her you can predict: her self-protection. I listened to the songs for about a month. As they worked their way into my heart I began to form a surface comprehension of her beliefs: a cyclical, cynical, chasing-after-the-wind sort of paradigm, desolate, independent, irreversibly sad, and—finally—hedonistic. She roots her despair in a life distinctly Southern. Almost everyone in the musical universe she presents lives in a trailer and exudes hypocrisy. For instance, she delivers a charming declamation to a nosy neighbor woman:

You ain’t gotta act like you’re borrowing eggs Just to see if my dishes are washed. And what’s it to you if it’s Wednesday at noon And I’ve traded my iced tea for scotch?

Keep your two cents on your side of the fence. Girl, we ain’t friends. We’re just neighbors.

Musgraves seems a telling specimen of my generation because of her deep and forthright loneliness. “God sets the lonely in families,” the psalmist says. God has taken in many of us who were lonely and resistant to relationship. We can pray that for Kacey Musgraves—even if she is famous.