To be honest, I dreaded the rhinestone ballsack.
A couple days before Kacey Musgraves arrived in Toronto for the second stop on her Middle of Nowhere tour, images emerged showing the Texas country star perched atop a massive, slightly asymmetrical scrotum; a giant pair of glittering truck nuts gliding gracefully above a crowd. Mediated through social media, the bit seemed tacky and gross. In fact, it sort of gave me the ick.
Fortunately, these concerns quickly waned as Musgraves's seven-piece band took the stage, marching toward their instruments like professional wrestlers as AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" blasted through Scotiabank Arena last night (August 24).
Moments later, Musgraves appeared on an elevated secondary stage, designed to evoke a dilapidated trailer somewhere in Texas. Dressed in denim, knee-length boots and a white cowboy hat, with just a splash of glitter on her face, she opened the set with a moving rendition of "Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy," her sturdy voice projecting almost tangible warmth across the venue; her winking charm casting outward like lasso, pulling the adoring audience tightly into her strange, trippy orbit, a place where anything goes.
Musgraves is a beguiling pop star. Equipped with a twangy voice that seems custom-build for country radio, she's spent much of her career challenging the genre's stubborn orthodoxies: infusing her music with elements of disco, folk and gentle psychedelia, peppering her songs with references to drug use and sex.
It's an approach she perfected on 2018's Golden Hour — a sublime country pop record inspired by Sade and Neil Young that won the Grammy for Album of the Year — though it seemed to produce diminishing returns on her two subsequent LPs (2021's underrated breakup album star-crossed and the 2024 snoozefest Deeper Well).
Earlier this year, much to the delight of her fans, Musgraves pivoted back to something resembling pure country music Middle of Nowhere, an album that leans heavily into her Southern roots — which were on full display at Scotiabank Arena as she led her band through a crowd-pleasing setlist, performing from on top of a giant star-shaped stage set within a larger, 360-degree rotating stage that resembled a rodeo arena.
From the get-go, the audience — vaguely progressive and queer, if mostly — was enraptured, belting every word to "Dry Spell," the humorous lead single from Middle of Nowhere about going nearly a year without sex, and swaying along to a warped, slowed-down rendition of the Golden Hour favourite "High Horse."
Midway through the show, Musgraves was joined the stage's centre by her accordion player for a delightful mini-set of Tejano (or Tex-Mex) music, including her Willie Nelson collaboration "Uncertain Texas" and a cover of a song by Tejano supergroup Texas Tornados.
Elevated by a clever set design and immersive visual effects (pyro! fireworks!), the performance felt absorbing but unpredictable. Unlike many other pop artists of her stature, Musgraves does not lean on choreography or costume changes, relying instead on her easy charisma and the strength of her songwriting.
Truth be told, I'd forgotten all about the scrote by the time it finally made an appearance, about three quarters of the way into the show.
"It takes a lot of balls to get up here every night and do what we do," Musgraves said as the testicular mass descended from above. "This is what it looks like when nobody tells me no," she added, before buckling herself into the genital pouch.
Perhaps it was the effects of the mild weed gummy that I ate before the show finally kicking in, but as Musgraves rose for a performance of "Rhinestoned" — a dreamy song about getting high to mask the pain of heartache — the glittering ballbag made perfect sense.
This was not a simple celebration of truck nuts (a common sight in both Texas and Alberta), but a subtle subversion of the aggressively masculine culture they've come to symbolize. Country music is more malleable than you think, the nuts seemed to say. Country music can be far more queer and weird and interesting than whatever the dumbfoundingly popular bro-country guys are making. ("Lesbians love Kacey," Musgraves would later add.)
Heartened by this revelation, I settled happily in for the show's final stretch, a brilliant run of songs including the surprise hit "Mexico Honey" (the closest Musgraves has ever sounded to Lana Del Rey), as well as Golden Hour greats "Slow Burn" and "Space Cowboy."
