Kacey Musgraves – Dry Spell

335 Days, One Supermarket, and the Funniest Country Song Kacey Musgraves Has Ever Written

When Kacey Musgraves released “Dry Spell” on March 11, 2026, she opened it with what might be the most disarmingly candid first line in recent country memory: a precise tally of exactly how long it had been, elongated vowels and conspiratorial deadpan intact. That figure — 335 days — is not an invention. It is autobiographical down to the day, which makes the subsequent cascade of double entendres feel less like a comedy exercise and more like someone deciding the only reasonable response to a genuine situation is to write the world’s most self-aware country song about it. The official music video, co-directed by Musgraves and Hannah Lux Davis, sets the whole thing loose in a supermarket, and is probably best watched somewhere your boss cannot wander past.

As the lead single from her forthcoming sixth studio album Middle of Nowhere, due May 1, 2026, “Dry Spell” arrived too recently for chart positions to have fully settled. What matters right now is the cultural temperature: the track went immediately viral, with fans cataloguing every visual gag in the video and debating which line lands hardest. Musgraves is an eight-time Grammy winner — including Album of the Year for Golden Hour — and her ability to pivot between philosophical grandeur and flat-out absurdism without losing an ounce of credibility is essentially her superpower. Nothing in her catalog had quite committed to the joke this hard before.

The song grew directly from the longest period of solitude in Musgraves’ adult life. She had always been in relationships, and when that run ended she found herself, for the first time, genuinely on her own. The discovery that being alone felt not just survivable but liberating runs through the whole album as a quiet undercurrent — but “Dry Spell” is the part of that realization where the profundity wears off and the inconvenience sets in. She brought the concept to co-writers Luke Laird, Shane McAnally, and Josh Osborne precisely because she knew they would embrace the humor rather than soften it. Musgraves has cited John Prine as her model for anchoring emotional truth with a well-timed laugh, and the fingerprints of that influence are audible throughout the track’s construction.

Middle of Nowhere was produced by Musgraves alongside longtime collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk — the same trio behind Deeper Well — and recorded across sessions in Texas, Tennessee, and Mexico. The album draws on pedal steel, accordion, Texas dancehall rhythms, and borderland textures, reflecting what Musgraves describes as the musical DNA of a Texas that would not exist without Mexico. The video, co-directed with Hannah Lux Davis — whose recent credits include some of the most inventive clips in contemporary pop — commits fully to its premise: every item Musgraves encounters in the supermarket aisles manages to echo the song’s central preoccupation, and the camera holds a beat longer than necessary on each one. It is a masterclass in comedic restraint from a singer who usually gets credit for her earnestness.

Middle of Nowhere marks Musgraves’ return to Lost Highway Records, the label that first signed her in 2011 before it was absorbed into the major label system. The album’s title came from a real sign in her hometown of Golden, Texas — population under 300, no stoplight — that reads “Golden, TX: Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” The 13-track set features guest appearances from Willie Nelson, Billy Strings, Gregory Alan Isakov, and Miranda Lambert. The Lambert collaboration, a duet called “Horses and Divorces,” closes a long-running subplot: Musgraves originally co-wrote “Mama’s Broken Heart” with Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark as her own debut single, only for it to be pitched to Lambert without her knowledge. For over a decade the two Texas artists orbited each other cautiously. The duet, born after Musgraves spotted Lambert riding horses on Instagram, puts that chapter to rest.

Hannah Lux Davis is one of the most consistently inventive directors working in music video right now, equally comfortable with Ariana Grande’s most theatrical concepts and Olivia Rodrigo’s controlled dread. Her collaboration with Musgraves here is genuinely matched — two artists committed to the joke without ever winking at the camera hard enough to break it. The opening setup is disarmingly ordinary: Musgraves pulls into a supermarket parking lot in an oversized hoodie, baggy shorts, socks and sliders, the universal “quick errand” uniform. About 35 seconds in, the whole conceit announces itself, and the video never looks back.

“Dry Spell” is Kacey Musgraves at her most defiantly unserious — which, in her catalog, is its own kind of serious move. Since Golden Hour she has steadily expanded the emotional register of what country music is allowed to do, and Middle of Nowhere appears set to add the one dimension that was still missing: permission to be genuinely funny without it diminishing anything. She said it plainly: “I find the human condition pretty hilarious. I feel like the universe has a pretty killer sense of humor.” On the evidence of this song, she is not wrong.