Kacey Musgraves said she had never talked about self-pleasure before, but on her new album she does exactly that with the kind of shrugging candor that has long set her apart. The 37-year-old singer pointed to “Sitting on the washing machine” as her favorite lyric on “Dry Spell,” a song that lands on Middle of Nowhere, her sixth studio album, due May 1.
That line comes from a track that does not flirt with double meaning so much as walk straight through it. In “Dry Spell,” Musgraves sings, “It’s been a real long 335 days / And the last time, it wasn’t good anyway,” a blunt admission that she said reflected a stretch that had crossed the year mark and may have reached a year and a half. She said that when she performs the song live, the lyric could stretch to 547 days, turning a private joke into a running one.
Musgraves’ willingness to talk so plainly about sex and loneliness fits the arc of a career that began in 2013 with Same Trailer, Different Park, one of the most acclaimed country debuts of all time, and later reached a higher peak with Golden Hour, which won the Grammy for album of the year in 2019. Middle of Nowhere is her third album since that breakthrough, and “Dry Spell” plays like the clearest sign that she still knows how to turn discomfort into a hook.
The video for the song pushes that instinct even further. Musgraves said it was set in a supermarket filled with phallic fruit, a visual joke she knows is not for everyone in her family. Her grandmother has not seen it yet, she said, though her father texted during the shoot to say Nana had been rushed to the hospital after a scary extreme high blood pressure incident. By the morning of the interview, Musgraves said her grandmother was doing great.
That kind of pivot — from raunchy joke to family worry in the space of a day — is what makes “Dry Spell” feel more revealing than provocative. Musgraves said she wanted to be honest about how little was happening in that part of her life, adding that many people try to convince others how much they have going on in that department. She said the appeal of staying in a rut can become its own trap, because it feels protective to avoid bringing in transient energy. That is the real tension in the song: not the punch line, but the admission that comfort and caution can look a lot alike until someone sings about them aloud.
