JUANA SUMMERS: Each week, a well-known guest draws a card from our Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Grammy-winning artist Kacey Musgraves bucks a lot of country music conventions. Sure, she writes beautiful songs about love and heartbreak, but she also writes about smoking pot and queer relationships. Musgraves released her newest album, "Deeper Well," earlier this year, and she talked to host Rachel Martin about growing up in small town Texas and how leaving home opened up her mind.
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RACHEL MARTIN: Pick a card - one, two, three.
KACEY MUSGRAVES: Let's go for two.
MARTIN: Two - was there a bedrock truth in your life that you came to find out wasn't true?
MUSGRAVES: You know, growing up, the acceptance of people in the queer community was kind of nonexistent where I grew up. I could count on one hand the amount of times I encountered an openly gay person. That's not to say that I encountered people who were closeted. But there was a very kind of typically majority one-way view of it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, that kind of, like, mentality. And so I kind of, like, left Texas with sort of this kind of idea that, well, people choose to be that way.
And when I moved to Nashville, I started making friends in that community. And I actually had a boyfriend at the time who did me a huge favor. He was from a completely different upbringing than me. He was like from a liberal family, like upstate New York, and he had a ton of gay friends. And he just sat me down one day, and, like, we had a real hard and honest conversation about it. And he was like, listen, like, you do not have the right perspective on this.
Like, and he, like - I don't know. He just helped me completely open up my eyes and see. And I was just like, damn. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to get out of where I came from and to have my eyes and my heart open to this really wonderful group of people. And they've made me way more well rounded.
MARTIN: I mean, it's not, like, central to your music, but you do talk about queer relationships, acknowledge queer people in your art. I mean, that's clearly intentional. Do you feel sort of an obligation to use your platform that way?
MUSGRAVES: Well, you know, one of the best compliments that I've ever received in terms of my music and who I am in the world, you know, it's when occasionally people come up to me and say, hey, I grew up in a really small town like you did, and I've always loved country music, but I've never felt invited to that party. Honestly, it really wasn't about ever pushing buttons ever. It just was me kind of observing what was happening around me and, you know, doing my job as a songwriter to put that in the form of a song. And, like, to me, country music is always about real people, real stories, and why wouldn't it continue to evolve?
HOST: That's musician Kacey Musgraves talking with NPR's Rachel Martin. To hear more from that conversation, follow the Wild Card podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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