Kacey Musgraves - A Very Kacey Christmas (2016) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Songwriter and country singer Kacey Musgraves was born in East Texas, and made her stage debut at eight years old. One year later, she was writing her own songs and learning to play several instruments, including guitar, harmonica, and mandolin. She self-released three albums before catching a break when she appeared as a contestant on the 2007 season of the American Idol-styled television show Nashville Star. She came in seventh in the competition, but the exposure allowed her to make some inroads on the Nashville music scene, and she began placing songs with major country artists like Martina McBride and Miranda Lambert. She signed a recording deal with Mercury Records in 2012, which issued a first single, the wise, taut, and very impressive "Merry Go 'Round," later that same year. In March 2013, her first album for Mercury, Same Trailer Different Park, was released, earning significant praise and generating two further hits in the singles "Blowin' Smoke" and "Follow Your Arrow," the latter reaching number ten on the Billboard country singles chart. Due to all this success, Musgraves was nominated for three ACM Awards, including Female Vocalist of the Year; she won the ACM for Album of the Year. Musgraves began work on her second album in 2014, wrapping it up in early 2015. Preceded by the single "Biscuits," Pageant Material appeared in June 2015 to positive reviews; it debuted at number one on the Billboard country chart and number three on the Top 200. Musgraves followed the album in October of 2016 with the seasonal record A Very Kacey Christmas.

Its follow-up, A Very Kacey Christmas, is yet another left turn from Musgraves. The third album is pretty early in an artist’s catalog for a holiday record, but she throws herself into this one as wholeheartedly as any proper LP. Her great epiphany is the short distance between rhinestones and aluminum trees, how what once was considered tacky and artificial can, with time, come to seem nostalgic and real. Musgraves’ album summons up the mid-’60s era nostalgia of A Charlie Brown Christmas, gliding naturally from her established Western-swing throwback aesthetic to kitschy exotica and vintage pop, with an expertly curated song selection that leans on campy novelties, classy standards, and a stocking’s worth of originals.

Because our Christmas recordings pile up over the years, to be dusted off with the other decorations for a few weeks and then put back in their boxes, they may be one of the few types of albums many people still play in full. The sequencing of A Very Kacey Christmas exploits this advantage. Musgraves doesn’t rush her conceit, opening elegantly but conventionally with cello and pedal steel on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” followed by a sleigh bells- and fiddle-accented “Let It Snow” with fellow Western swingers the Quebe Sisters. She shows her hand next on of all things! a polka-like cover of “Christmas Don’t Be Late,” a/k/a “The Chipmunk Song.” Replacing the cartoon characters’ irritating high-pitched voices with Musgraves’ crystalline effortlessness (and ditching the “ALVIN!!!” banter) renders this familiar bit of silliness deeply affecting; when Musgraves sings, “I still want a hula-hoop,” it’s with the poignancy of a adult yearning for all that she didn’t get in Christmases past.

Tracklist:

01. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
02. Let It Snow [feat. The Quebe Sisters]
03. Christmas Don't Be Late
04. A Willie Nice Christmas [feat. Willie Nelson]
05. Feliz Navidad
06. Christmas Makes Me Cry
07. Present Without A Bow [feat. Leon Bridges]
08. Mele Kalikimaka [feat. The Quebe Sisters]
09. I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas
10. Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer
11. Ribbons And Bows
12. What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?



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