The video for Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” premieres on CMT, iHeartRadio and kacemusgraves.com on Monday (December 9th). The Grammy-nominated artist shot the clip, which also features her band, in Joshua Tree, California.
“Follow Your Arrow” is from Kacey’s Same Trailer, Different Park album, which finds itself on a lot of “Best Album” lists of 2013, including Spin, Rolling Stone, Paste Magazine and Acoustic Guitar magazine.
KACEY MUSGRAVES 2013 TOP 10 LISTS
#1 – Top 10 Albums of 2013 – Washington Post
The dread of the millenials can’t be captured in a selfie, so Nashville’s newest star is picking up the slack and singing about what happens when a generation of idealists inherits a broken country. With optimism in her melodies and calm in her delivery, she’s dropped one of country music’s strongest debuts in forever.
#4 – 10 Best albums of 2013 – Entertainment Weekly
“But while she may not be a country outlaw, she’s a girl next door you’d be wise not to underestimate.”
#28 – “50 BEST ALBUMS OF 2013” – Rolling Stone
This charmingly matter-of-fact 25-year-old Texan makes commercial country sound artistically fertile again. Singing about a friend with benefits (“It Is What It Is”) or weed smokin’ and same-sex kissing (“Follow Your Arrow”), she’s ballsy, traditional and pop. Call her the millennials’ Loretta Lynn.
#20 – The 50 Best Albums of 2013 – Paste
When it comes to humor, straightforwardness and never, ever giving a shit, Kacey Musgraves is taking all the right cues. Lyrics about same-sex kissing and double standards may still be scarce on commercial country airwaves, but that hasn’t stopped Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” from rising as a fan favorite. A top-seller despite its lack of radio play, the song has become popular across genre lines by promoting open-mindedness in a way country music hasn’t necessarily seen before. The writing on Same Trailer Different Park builds on the simplicity and straightforwardness of country classics while mixing in distinctly modern romantic sentiments, freshening the sound for a new generation of music-lovers.—Dacey Orr
#7 – 50 Best Songs of 2013 – Paste
If country radio balked at the notion of “kiss lots of girls—if that’s something you’re into” and “Roll up a joint—just follow your arrow wherever it points,” Musgraves’ bit o’ sunshine declared country fans are willing to embrace the modern world as it really is. In spite of its exuberance, the slight songwriter nails hypocrisy from both sides (“if you can’t lose the weight, you’re just fat/ but if you lose too much, you’re on crack” and “if you don’t go to church, you’ll go to hell/if you’re the first one on the front row, you’re a self-righteous son of…”) and embraces the notion to live life as you wish, be kind and enjoy the ride. Easily country’s true single of the year.
#17 – 50 Best Albums of 2013 – SPIN
Kacey Musgraves, Same Trailer Different Park (Mercury Nashville)
Hopefully, 10 years hence, this doesn’t feel revolutionary — may the casually devastating dead-ender real talk of “Merry Go ‘Round” and cheerful smooch-whoever-you-want humanism of “Follow Your Arrow” scan as mere common sense to our children, and theirs. But in 2013, surrounded by a cacophony of sleeveless, guileless bros pimping small-town, truck-bed-beauty-queen false utopias, both tunes are witty, cutting gunshots fired from the front rows at the CMAs. When you tire of those, “Blowing Smoke” is a catty riot and “Back on the Map” a pristine pity party. She’s the Venom to Taylor Swift’s Spider-Man, and a poison we can’t live without.
#7 – Top 50 Albums of 2013 – American Songwriter
For an album whose title is a riff on the phrase “same shit, different day”—the ultimate expression of indifference when you’re stuck in a rut—Same Trailer, Different Park completely avoids the defensive, down-home partying posture and manufactured nostalgia of so much contemporary country music. In 2013, the genre was home to no other singer as casually, fetchingly frank and no other songwriter as resistant to cliché as Kacey Musgraves. At any given moment, you could find two or three country hunks singing about the unchaperoned, beer-fueled, footloose-and-fancy-free feeling that tends to elude anyone over the age of 18, and sounding rather strained doing it. Meanwhile, this Texas native, who only turned 25 this summer, applied tuneful finesse and timely narrative detail to fleshing out what it’s like to live with a hemmed-in state-of-mind versus a liberated one, and made an army of smart, young listeners feel like she was speaking their language in the process.
#3 – Best albums of 2013 – Taste Of Country
Kacey Musgraves proves herself to be one of Nashville’s top songwriters on her debut project ‘Same Trailer, Different Park,’ an album that truly stretches the genre. While just short of groundbreaking — the Pistol Annies may have paved the way, or at least cut the trail for her — Musgraves’ ideas are bold and refreshing without being so edgy that she cuts those trying to get close. ‘Silver Linings,’ ‘Dandelion’ and ‘Follow Your Arrow’ are three one wants to hear again and again, but the entire album is packed with substantial lyrics that will stand the test of time.
1 of 5 – Best Albums of 2013 – Acoustic Guitar Magazine
It’s refreshing to find country music that’s so unabashedly unafraid of marijuana and homosexuality, but even better isMusgraves‘ singing and guitar playing. She’s a songwriter who doesn’t rely on the same old Nashville lyrical tropes, and manages to make even simple riffs sound fresh. (Mercury)
#16 – Best Albums of 2013 – The Guardian
What we said: “At her core, she’s a country traditionalist … [her] songs are populated by characters as old as country music itself: the trash-talking waitress of Blowin’ Smoke, the substance-addicted family whose plight she treats sympathetically on Merry Go Round … Musgraves’s rural heart is tempered with an outsiderish scepticism, and her real work is urging people to think for themselves.”
