Kacey Musgraves – Mexico Honey

Kacey Musgraves played an unreleased album track at Coachella in April, and the song nobody chose as a single became the record’s biggest

Coachella, Weekend 2, April 18, 2026. Kacey Musgraves turned up unannounced and played a song from an album that would not exist for another two weeks. It was track twelve. Nobody at the label had chosen it as a single, and nobody planned to. What the crowd heard was two and a half minutes of Tejano-inflected country delivered at a clip closer to rapping than singing, about a man in a cowboy hat and a country she cannot stop going back to. Three months later it is the most-streamed song on the record and the only one with a video shot on location.

Keep watching: Kacey Musgraves – Dry Spell · Kacey Musgraves – Blowin’ Smoke

Middle of Nowhere arrived on May 1, 2026, Musgraves’ sixth studio album and her first for Lost Highway since the label relaunched in 2025 — a neat circle, given she was the last artist signed to it before it folded the first time. She produced the record with Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, the pair she has worked with since Golden Hour. The title came off a road sign in Golden, Texas, her hometown, population under three hundred: Golden, TX, Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere. The album that followed is mostly about being alone and finding it survivable.

Mexico Honey is the track that refuses to participate in that theme. Written with Luke Laird and Steph Jones, it takes the country itself as the metaphor and pins it onto a person — the warmth, the sweetness, the pull of a place she has spent serious time in, transferred wholesale onto a man in a bar. Musgraves told W Magazine that spending time in Mexico had been inspiring and that she is naturally shaped by her surroundings. The song is what that sounds like when it stops being a holiday and starts being a feeling.

The one nobody picked

The rollout gave the singles to other songs. Dry Spell came first on March 11, then the title track in April, then Loneliest Girl after release. Mexico Honey got none of that. It climbed anyway, on streams and word of mouth and the kind of fan-made video traffic that no marketing department controls, and by late July it sat at No. 59 on the Billboard Hot 100 and first among the album’s thirteen tracks by streaming volume. Billboard ranked it eighth on the record in its own track-by-track assessment. The listeners disagreed.

Some of that is the arrangement, which does not sound like the rest of the album or much else on country radio. Russ Pahl’s pedal steel and Todd Lombardo’s mandolin sit against a rhythm built for a dance floor, and Musgraves delivers the verses in a rapid, clipped cadence that leaves the melody to the chorus. Steph Jones, who co-wrote it, sings the background vocals; her other credits include Sabrina Carpenter’s Nonsense and Espresso, which explains a certain pop economy in how the hook is built. Šerban Ghenea mixed it. The record it belongs to went to No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on Top Album Sales, Vinyl Albums, and Indie Store Album Sales, moving 100,000 equivalent units in its first week — her best ever — with more than 37,000 of those on vinyl alone.

Shot where the song is set

The video premiered July 22, 2026, filmed on location in Mexico and directed by Running Bear, the duo of Alexa Stone and Stephen Kinigopoulos. It follows the lyric closely enough to function as an illustration of it. The opening shot has Musgraves in a car doing exactly what the first verse describes, and the hot-pink shorts named in the chorus are the ones she wears onstage in a karaoke bar — the second time she has filmed herself performing her own song to a room, after High Horse in 2018. The rest follows a whirlwind through the country the song is named for, and the label framed it as much a tribute to Mexico as to anything that happened there.

It arrives in a crowded few weeks. Musgraves receives the ACM Spirit Award at the 19th ACM Honors in Nashville on August 19, 2026, an award named for Merle Haggard and given for storytelling. The Middle of Nowhere Tour opens the following night at the United Center in Chicago and runs into February 2027. For a song the album’s own campaign passed over, Mexico Honey has ended up doing a great deal of the work.