Follow Your Arrow

There is a kind of radical gentleness to this song, a way it delivers genuinely subversive ideas in the sweetest possible wrapping. The production is warm and unhurried — finger-picked acoustic guitar, fiddle threading through the chorus, a tempo that never pushes — rooted in traditional country instrumentation while the lyrics quietly dismantle the moral code that instrumentation usually serves. Kacey Musgraves lays out a portrait of social contradiction with the lightness of someone pointing out the obvious: that people will judge you no matter what you do, so you might as well do exactly what makes you happy. The vocal is playful but never smirking, pitched somewhere between a wink and a sincere shrug. When she released this in 2013, it created real tension in Nashville — the references to same-sex love and recreational marijuana were quietly transgressive in a genre that had calcified around a particular moral geography. It won a Grammy for Country Song of the Year anyway. The song holds up as a document of the cracks forming in mainstream country's cultural politics, and as something more timeless: permission slipped between three chords and a chorus, offered to anyone who needed to hear it.