01 August 2023

1 August 2023 - Kacey Musgraves - Blowin' Smoke

I'm haivng a little trouble believing that Same Trailer, Different Park, the debut album by Kacey Musgraves, is ten years old this year.  

This was one of the singles off that album.  It was a relatively big country radio hit and even bubbled under the Hot 100, which means it got a lot of POP radio airplay - in a era when such a crossover was uncommon

The song is a clever play on words - the "Blowin' Smoke" is both a reference to the protagonist of the song smoking and also to the phrase "blowing smoke up one's ass", or in other words, talking trash and generally doing a lot of talking - her words.  And, there's a lot of blowin' smoke in this song - mostly about her co-workers, one of whom just left for Vegas (so there's a little jealousy going on here). It's clever and witty - and a little dark.


It's refreshing to hear a live version of a song sound a lot like the studio version.  The song is just as quietly cool unproduced than it is on vinyl.   Also, that tambourine playing by Kacey is epic.


But what about when the stage and crowd get a lot bigger, like at Farm Aid 30, in 2015?  By this time, her 2nd album, which had a more traditional country feeling, had been released, and so her band was tuned for that.  It sounds less pop and more country - but it's still the same old song about blowin' smoke.

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