Austin City Limits: Kacey Musgraves, Lukas Nelson (Terry Lickona Productions, KLRU, PBS, c. 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After midnight I watched a couple of music shows on KPBS that used to be perennial favorites of mine when I could still record them for later viewing onto physical media (now you can only do that digitally and it requires an extra charge on our already swollen cable bill). One was an Austin City Limits episode featuring Kacey Musgraves, who did a program of seven songs from her 2018 album Golden Hour (which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2019 – though I remember when I was watching that show thinking that if the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences wanted to give Album of the Year to a country artist, it should have been fellow nominee Brandi Carlile) and Willie Nelson’s son Lukas Nelson with his band Promise of the Real. (Of course I couldn’t help remembering way back in 1975 when the very first episode of Austin City Limits debuted with Willie Nelson as the featured performer. When they say this is the longest-running live musical show on TV, I’m ready to believe them.)

The Wikipedia page on Golden Hour claims that Musgraves wrote the album (she has co-composer credit on all 13 songs) just after she got married, and quotes her as saying that affected the quality of the material: “I’ve never been one to write a love song and really feel it. That probably sounds like the most depressing thing ever. [But] I’m coming off getting married and being in this golden hour of my personal life, where all these things are finally coming to fruition.” The result was a set of pleasant and good-natured songs including “Velvet Elvis” (in which she compared her lover to one of those God-awful paintings of Elvis on velvet, saying it’s hunky but also soft to the touch), “Slow Burn,” “Butterflies” (in which her beloved gives her butterflies in her stomach – it’s hardly an anthem on the level of Mariah Carey’s “Butterfly,” but Carey wrote her song when she was coming off of a relationship and was expressing her sense of freedom that she was showing off what she could do without a man whom a lot of people had thought of as her Svengali) and “High Horse,” along with three songs she had recorded earlier: “Family Is Family,” “High Time” and my favorite, “Follow Your Arrow.”

That one is a typical follow-your-dreams-and-be-what-you-want-to-be number but I have a special affection for it if only because she sings that one of the things she wants her listeners to feel free to do is “kiss boys, or kiss girls if that’s what you’re into.” This is definitely not your grandmother’s country music! I like Kacey Musgraves but what I don’t hear in her voice is the kind of soul I hear in the singing of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton (whom she name-checked in her brief interview segment and oddly talked about in the past tense even though they’re both still alive) or in the singing of modern women country artists I like better, including Brandi Carlile, Lauren Alaina, Maren Morris and the astonishing Tenille Townes; it’s just that little spark that’s the difference between goodness and greatness. Lukas Nelson followed with his band, Promise of the Real (which have got enough acclaim Neil Young has toured with them as his backup band), and on faster songs he pushes up his band, growls and sounds like a rock singer. On slower songs he drops his register and adopts the quiet, conversational tone that (let’s face it) made his dad a star.

He began with a song called “Gimme Something Real,” then ran back to his heritage with an oddball ballad called “Let Me Forget About Georgia.” Apparently the point of the song is that he was in a hotel room making love to a woman named Georgia while the song that was playing on the radio was Ray Charles’ version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” (a song Willie Nelson also recorded, by the way), only the relationship ended badly and now that song brings back unpleasant memories. Then Lukas Nelson sent his band members off stage for one song, “Just Outside of Austin,” and sounded even more like his dad – and let’s not get into the importance of Austin not only as the city where this show is based but how important it was for Willie Nelson’s career (it saved him and brought him to superstardom after Nashville had chewed him up and spat him out). Then he brought the band back with an odd song called “Set Me Down on the Plow (With My Soul Turned Inside-Out),” a truly bizarre fantasy of what Lukas Nelson presumably wants done with his remains when he croaks. Lukas’s last official number was “Turn Off the News” – a piece of advice to turn off the news and instead grow your garden (a piece of advice previously handed down by writers from Voltaire to The Hunger Games creator Suzanne Collins) – though over the closing credits he was shown doing part of another song, “I Hope You Find Yourself.” Despite the long shadow his father is inevitably (if unintentionally) casting over him, Lukas Nelson is a quite good singer, songwriter and bandleader, and at least one other of Willie’s offspring, Micah Nelson, is in the band as one of its percussionists.