Kacey Musgraves Fuses the Real and Fantastical for an Unforgettable Night at AAC

Kacey Musgraves — forest green wellies on her feet, acoustic guitar in her lap — sat on a rough-hewn wooden bench Friday night, Saturn looming overhead.

She had departed the expansive main stage at the other end of the jam-packed American Airlines Center for a smaller, satellite stage that was decked out to look like the corner of some wild English garden, two of her band members seated near her.

The 36-year-old Grammy winner was picking at her guitar strings, midway through a deeply felt introduction to one of her first big hits — and first controversies — “Follow Your Arrow.” A decade on from its debut, the song, somehow, feels slightly anachronistic in its nonchalant naiveté, and more desperately urgent than ever. It was in this monologue that Musgraves both hit upon the marrow-deep truth of her career to date and distilled the evening to its essence.

“I love country music so much,” she said. “It’s a genre born from real songs and real stories — things that are hard to talk about, but you can sing about them. Real shit.”

The roar that followed from the near-capacity audience — Friday was Musgraves’ first of two nights at the venue; she’ll appear again Saturday — illustrated the love and appreciation for her willingness to venture into the trenches of life.

It’s one thing to sing about matters of little consequence: trucks, beer, back roads. It’s another to dig into the complexities of being alive, open a metaphorical vein and find hope in the hardest moments.

Through all of her eras, Musgraves has unswervingly made the unflinching choice, and that pattern continued with her tour supporting her sixth and latest LP, Deeper Well. Although there was plenty of sophisticated arena razzle-dazzle surrounding the songs, much of the material was raw, vulnerable and some of the best music she’s yet made.

Friday’s performance was her first in North Texas in roughly two-and-a-half years, returning to the same venue she last played in support of 2021's star-crossed.

For about 105 minutes, Musgraves, backed by her nimble, seven-piece band — drummer Rob Humphreys, bassist Tarron Crayton, pianist-backing vocalists John Whitt and Darek Cobbs, and guitarists-backing vocalists Drew Taubenfeld, Benjamin Jaffe and Jon Sosin — deftly played with the tension between dark and light, moving from the spare, folky opener “Cardinal” to the luminous “Butterflies” to the anxious, hopeful and beautiful “Too Good to Be True.”

The warm, textured washes of sound generated by the suit-clad men behind Musgraves was impressive, as wringing nuance out of such an immense space is no easy task. However, Friday’s performance felt as roomy and detailed as the records themselves, allowing the material to fill the space in satisfying fashion.

The days when Musgraves performed amid neon cacti as her band gamely plugged away behind her in lighted Nudie suits are a distant memory now. As her career has grown in scale, so, too, has the presentation. Musgraves, her limber soprano in fine, assertive form, now seems quite comfortable amid the expanse of an arena show (in a way she wasn't quite on her last trip through North Texas). The show deployed everything from copious amounts of dry ice “smoke” — there was a moment when Musgraves, barefoot as always, was seated on the stage and singing, the fog making her disappear entirely — and riotous banks of lights to vast LED screens depicting everything from storm-ravaged mountaintops to Kermit the Frog memes.

She’s also far more comfortable speaking directly to the audience rather than letting her crisply written, sharply observed songs do the talking for her, as was more often the case earlier on.

At one point, Musgraves offered up a passionate mea culpa for her recent, headline-making joke about her hometown of Golden — “I can be a pretty sarcastic bitch [but] I would love to eat a big old piece of humble pie; I fucking love where I’m from,” she said — and elsewhere, alluded to the recent presidential elections (“We’ve gotten through a chaotic last few weeks here in America; none of that is in here”).

Her invitation to those gathered to “feel yourself, be yourself” extended to the hostess as well, whose light touch fusing the real and the fantastical yielded some ecstatic moments, including her now-traditional cover of Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon,” before an enormous projected moon on the expansive video screens, a colorful, confetti-doused rendition of “High Horse,” and an interlude where she journeyed from the satellite stage back to the main stage accompanied by what my notes tell me were “various woodland and fairy tale-seeming creatures waving banners and flags.”

Musgraves also welcomed a special guest to the stage late in the proceedings: Leon Bridges, himself just seven days removed from his triumphant Dickies Arena headlining gig in Fort Worth, who strolled onto the stage, clad in all denim, to a wall of elated screams to sing “Superbloom” with Musgraves, from the extended edition of Deeper Well.

All of it reinforced her point: Dress it up however you like, but at the end of the day, songs don’t resonate — and to gaze around the packed arena Friday, teeming with women decked out in their Western finery singing at the top of their lungs, the vibes were vibing — unless they mean something. It’s a timeless notion, and one that Kacey Musgraves drove home Friday in enthralling fashion.

The night began with a pair of fantastic opening sets.

The first came from folk group Nickel Creek, whose dazzling interplay remains astonishing to behold — Chris Thile’s quicksilver tenor darting between Sara Watkins’ fiddle, Mark Schatz’s upright bass and Sean Watkins’ acoustic guitar — and the wry humor in doling out a cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” fit neatly with the evening's campier undertones. Lord Huron’s expansive, cinematic and boldly odd set (frontman Ben Schneider singing into a payphone receiver, for some reason) was given wings by a run of outrageously beautiful songs, not least of which was “I Lied,” “Wait by the River” and “The Night We Met.”

A fulsome counterweight to the spry confections of Nickel Creek, Lord Huron served as a bridge between the light and the dark, in the process helping deliver a trifecta of phenomenal entertainment, and one of the sharpest top-to-bottom bills to pass through North Texas in recent memory.