Top 13 Songs of 2012: #8 (Kacey Musgraves, "Merry Go 'Round")

There's a lot to like about this sigh of a country song: the push and pull of the backing arrangement; the elegantly elongated chord progression in the chorus ("where it stops, nobody knows"); the conversational yet tuneful vocal; the revisionist nursery rhyme that serves as an outro, anchoring what could have been a drifty tune; and above all, the understatement of the whole affair, the refusal to go big and cheesy, when going big and cheesy must have been terribly tempting.

But in "Merry Go 'Round," the debut single from Kacey Musgraves (who's too talented and pretty to remain obscure for long), the lyrics are the main attraction. Rather than paying obeisance to small-town mythology, as every Nashville newcomer seemingly must, Musgraves says stuff like, "And it don't matter if you don't believe, / Come Sunday morning, you best be there in the front row like you're supposed to." Yeah, it's not exactly a Sinclair Lewis-style polemic. But in mainstream country, you hardly ever hear skepticism toward God and community, much less from an ingenue.

Bracing as it is, "Merry Go 'Round" also tells a lived-in, empathetic story about a place and an ethos. Particularly moving is the chorus:

Mama's hooked on Mary Kay,
Brother's hooked on Mary Jane,
Daddy's hooked on Mary, two doors down.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
We get bored, so we get married,
And just like dust, we settle in this town.
On this broken merry go 'round
And 'round and 'round we go,
Where it stops, nobody knows.

All of this punning on "Mary," "married," and "merry" might seem facile at first. But it turns out to be more than cleverness; the shared phonemes represent a shared disease: a helpless, mechanical repetition. Mother, brother, father, and singer (sister?) are trapped on the same Mary/married/merry go 'round. And ever so delicately, the circles sketched by the piano and the banjo suggest the same thing.



"Ain't what you want, it's what you know, / Just happy in the shoes you're wearin', / Same checks we're always cashin' to buy a little more distraction."