Biscuits

Country music's best recent contribution to the literature of minding your own business. "Biscuits" is a bright, unassailable hook ("mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy") delivered with the confidence of someone who has arrived at this philosophy through lived experience rather than borrowed wisdom. Production is upbeat without being frenetic — acoustic guitar snap, a rhythm section with genuine bounce, pedal steel providing the genre anchor. Musgraves's voice has a quality of amusement held in check, the vocal performance of someone delivering a gentle but firm piece of advice they've given before. The metaphor is brilliant in its domesticity: biscuits and gravy are specific, unpretentious, definitively Southern, and the extension of the metaphor into life advice makes the familiar strange in the most productive way. Lyrically, the song doesn't specify what inspired the advice — the universality is the point, the suggestion that virtually every human problem could be reduced or avoided by sustained attention to one's own concerns. Culturally, it arrives as something of an anti-social-media statement before anti-social-media statements became a genre, arguing for a form of deliberate non-involvement that has historical roots in rural community survival (where everyone knowing everyone's business was inevitable, but acting on that knowledge required careful calibration). Best heard when you are actively tempted to involve yourself in something that has nothing to do with you.