KACEY MUSGRAVES at the Danforth Music Hall, Saturday, April 11. Rating: NNNN
Country music star and proud Texan Kacey Musgraves, along with a five-piece light-up western-suit-clad band, charmed a sold-out crowd at the Danforth with an hour and a half of fiery tunes and magnetic stage presence.
Musgraves eased into things through clouds of incense with Silver Lining, waiting to break until she’d shaken up the rowdy crowd with Blowin’ Smoke. “I don’t know what you people do up here in Toronto,” she said. “But I hope it involves getting a little weird.”
“Weird” can be a bit liberal for country music, but the quality of Musgraves’s songs is genuinely a notch above her peers’. And the sight of neon cacti flanking her during a down-home singalong cover of TLC’s No Scrubs is definitely not what you’d expect from a country show.
That wasn’t the night’s only surprise. The band slipped into honky-tonk/pseudo-reggae-funk part way through Step Off, when Musgraves led the crowd in another singalong to Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds (way better than it sounds). She had everyone light up the hall with their cellphones. Openers Sugar and the Hi-lows joined in for a hootenanny version of My House. And that was all before the encore break.
Then for good measure, to set up her mega-hit Follow Your Arrow – “There’s a guy up here with a shirt that says, ‘My arrow points to dudes,’” she noted. “Mine too!” – she pulled out a swaggering cover of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.
Musgraves and her band are so super-pro that there’s not much room for spontaneity live, aside from in Musgraves’s banter. During the last tune, she got tough with a loud drunk. “Hey, listen, man,” she drawled. “I appreciate you comin’ to the show, but don’t fuckin’ ruin it for everyone else.”
After some thunderous hoots and hollers, she revealed the reason why crowd silence was so important at that particular moment: an unplugged, a cappella version of the Roy and Dale Evans Rogers classic Happy Trails.
music@nowtoronto.com | @MattGeeWilliams
