Review: Live: Kacey Musgraves charms Wiltern with her own kind of ‘Pageant’

For one fan at Kacey Musgraves’ sold-out show at the Wiltern on Friday, her song “Merry Go ‘Round” sounded like a horror movie.

Musgraves, the 27-year-old singer who shook up the country music establishment on her 2013 Grammy-winning LP, “Same Trailer Different Park,” sang its disappointed lyrics about getting trapped in a stifling life: “We get bored so we get married / Just like dust we settle in this town.”

From the rear of the Wiltern, a young female fan shrieked “Don’t do it!” back at her, as if Musgraves was a slasher-flick vixen about to investigate a creaking noise in the basement.

The crowd at the Wiltern bar laughed, and awaited the clincher lyric: “Jack and Jill went up the hill, Jack burned out on booze and pills / Mary had a little lamb, Mary just don’t give a damn no more.”

For country fans in liberal enclaves turned off by Nashville’s bro assembly line, Musgraves is a sequined Joan of Arc, vanquishing pop-country’s cut-offs and beer busts in a cleansing fire of weed and gay marriage. From the covers of hipster magazines like The Fader, Musgraves’ presence assures those Angelenos why they pay $1,600 a month to live in an Echo Park studio apartment above a freeway exit: Because back home must be so, so much worse.

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But as Friday’s show proved, the native of Golden, Texas, has a real affinity for those small-towners who woke up one day and found their options gone. She got out, but she understands why most don’t.

Her low-key, but regal Friday set found her right at that crossroads. She took a risk, and it won her Grammys and fame. But she’s still figuring out the influence - and even the allure - of that go-nowhere hometown.

On this tour, for new new album “Pageant Material,” Musgraves has a funny take on her current country-music stardom. Officially billed as the “Kacey Musgraves Country & Western Rhinestone Revue,” this outing gave a broke-millennial wink to the imagery of the Grand Ole Opry - teased-up hair, pink suit jackets and sparkly jumpers, a backing band dangled in cheap Christmas lights.

She opened the set with the new album’s title track, a funny shrug-off to expectations of poise and perfection placed on young women. “The only Crown is in my glass / They won’t be handin’ me a sash” is a line worthy of Dolly Parton. But here’s the thing: Musgraves still kind of loves the pageant.

All throughout the night, she played her famous odes to getting high and making out with girls (“Follow Your Arrow,” co-written with the acclaimed gay songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally) or her funny dispatches from barely-there towns (on “This Town”: “We finally got a flashing light, they put it in last year / And everybody got real happy when the grocery store got beer.”

But all along, they were tempered with tunes like “Family is Family” and “Dime Store Cowgirl” that reminded fans that prison, drugs, strained friendships and being told you’re cheap and dumb by the rich and powerful are pretty recognizably L.A. problems as well. Even though she “slept in a room with the ghost of Gram Parsons / Drank some wine I can’t afford,” she still will always “call my hometown home.”

This is a career-making moment for Musgraves, to see if she can sustain the momentum that let her beat a side-eying Taylor Swift for the Best Country Album Grammy and put her on tour with Katy Perry while maintaining every ounce of her country credibility.

Her Friday set was a little long and sometimes a bit sleepy: If nothing else, the titans of bro-country know when to fire up the Marshall amp stack. But Musgraves’ voice was in top form, a charming and relatable instrument that finds power in reserve.

Any act that can cover TLC’s “No Scrubs” and bring her new puppy out onstage isn’t taking herself too seriously. And that’s what fans hoping for a liberal savior are missing in Musgraves. Country music has old structures and tropes -- small-town virtue, allegiance to family, humility and humor. But subverting expectations is just as traditional, just like Musgraves’ idols Parton and Loretta Lynn have done for decades.

So, sorry, Brooklyn and Highland Park kids for whom country music stops at Johnny Cash: Musgraves is not your hero. But on Friday, she proved she’s something even better -- one of young country’s most empathetic and meaningful singer-songwriters.

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