Kacey Musgraves is a country singer who appeals beyond the usual boundaries of country radio, and that’s partly because she has always known how to make the traditional seem new. Across two remarkable albums, and even her often-brilliant 2016 holiday record, Musgraves has succeeded by bringing a whip-smart and contemporary sensibility to potentially kitschy retro tropes. She unabashedly dresses up a pro-love, pro-pot outlook in banjos and Nudie suits. On “Space Cowboy,” a new single from her upcoming album, Golden Hour, she once again wrenches the past into the painful present, but not in the way you might expect from the title.
Rather than just a riff on the sci-fi swashbucklers that inspired Elton John or David Bowie, “Space Cowboy” is Musgraves’ latest clever play on vintage Americana tropes. Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing she can do—so she sings about boots and Chevy pickups and horses, and her crystal-clear drawl is adorned with the twang of banjo and pedal steel. But she turns each of these clichés on their Stetson-topped heads (when she adds that “there ain’t room for both of us in this town,” it’s with resignation, not warning), so there’s no hokeyness, only heartache. “I know my place,” she declares, “and it ain’t with you.” The finishing shot is her breathtaking turn on the title phrase: “You can have your space, cowboy,” Musgraves sings, the comma leaving a pause as vast and lonesome as this austere breakup ballad’s roomy production. The person she addresses on “Space Cowboy” isn’t an astronaut, and from her withering tone he probably isn’t even really a cowboy, just some misguided fool who doesn’t realize he’s living in a truck commercial. It’s Musgraves who’s boldly riding off into the frontier.
