Kacey Musgraves closes ACL Fest's first weekend with exquisite melodies

Who was a better choice for the final show of weekend one at the Austin City Limits Music Festival: Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Kacey Musgraves?

If you wanted a relaxed, Sunday-evening-coming-down vibe after an altogether pleasant three-day weekend in Zilker Park, Musgraves was the obvious choice. Technically, the Chili Peppers were the big-draw headliner on the American Express stage, with Musgraves on the Honda stage. But Austin has always been a great market for Musgraves, who lived here briefly before the road to country stardom took her to Nashville.

We'd have to examine aerial photos to determine which act had the biggest draw, though it was probably RHCP. But the west end of the park was plenty packed for Musgraves' 75-minute performance, which featured 18 songs drawn primarily from her two most recent albums.

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The 34-year-old native Texan (born in Golden, raised in Mineola) had an easy rapport with the throngs of adoring fans who jammed the area near the front of the stage and sang along for much of the night. Though her biggest chart success has been in country — all four of her albums (not counting a 2016 holiday set) have topped Billboard's country charts — her music has increasingly crossed over to pop audiences in recent years.

She also has a strong following in the LGBTQ community, whose support she acknowledged early in the show. Though she didn't play her inclusive anthem "Follow Your Arrow," a 2013 single that went top-10 country, she echoed its themes when she thanked the audience for their "beautiful positivity and energy" before playing "Rainbow" from 2018's "Golden Hour" near the end of the set.

Other highlights from "Golden Hour," which won Musgraves a major Grammy Award for album of the year, included "Butterflies," "Lonely Weekend" and "Space Cowboy," all delivered with exquisite melodic grace by a splendid backing band that kept Musgraves' vocals front-and-center. She added eight songs from last year's "Star-Crossed," including the title track and hit singles "Camera Roll" and "Justified."

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Musgraves got political on a couple of occasions. During the upbeat "High Horse," she suggested that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz should "giddy up and ride straight out of this town." And she expressed dismay about the conservative turn of the Supreme Court before the uplifting "There Is a Light" from the new album.

So at ease with the crowd was Musgraves that at one point she paused to clip a couple of her fingernails. "It's this nail; it's too long for this song," she said, holding up a finger. Then another: "Oh, maybe this one too."

She bonded with the locals by revealing she'd made a stop earlier in the day at BookPeople. And before reaching back for a moving solo acoustic version of "Merry Go Round" from her 2012 debut "Same Trailer Different Park," she referenced her brief stint in Austin, lamenting that "I lived close to nothing cool. Maybe Taco Cabana, but that was it."

Musgraves followed "Merry Go Round" with her lone cover of the night, a sweet rendition of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" with the lyrics on the jumbotron for fans to follow along, karaoke-style. On Friday, the Chicks played Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" during their headlining set at the festival.

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In one respect, Musgraves did emerge as the de facto headliner: She was the last artist onstage at Zilker Park. Her set was scheduled to end at 9:30 p.m. and ran about eight minutes long. Meanwhile, across the park, purported headliner the Red Hot Chili Peppers were supposed to play until 10 p.m. but ended a half-hour early.

The problem with this was that the festival staggers set-ending times for a reason — to keep everyone from exiting the grounds at the same time. Thanks to the Chili Peppers early departure, Barton Springs Road was jam-packed as audiences from both stages filed out almost simultaneously.

There may have been worse exit bottlenecks in past years, but I'd never gotten caught in one this bad. After what had been a quite smooth-running ACL Fest for three days, it was an unfortunate and unforced blunder in the final moments of Weekend One.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Kacey Musgraves plays ACL 2022 Weekend 1 after Red Hot Chili Peppers