Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm Charlie Harding and I'm Nate Sloan.

Grab your cowboy boots and your pedal steel guitar because today we're going country.

We're lucky to be joined today by Andrew Morantz. He's an editor at The New Yorker

and appears on shows like Radio Lab. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

So Andrew, you recently wrote a wonderful article on KC Musgraves, an artist who's very dear to

our heart. She appeared in our very first episode about heartbreak and we see the KC is between

two different audiences that she's serving on one hand, the traditional country fans and on the

other disaffected millennials. I think Nate and I might fall a little bit more into the second

bunch along the way she has managed to upset some people and today we're going to explore

whether or not it's possible to criticize the values that country is founded on while being

a country star at the same time. So let's get into it and see what is so stirring and contradictory

about her music.

So to just jump right in, Andrew, what peaked your interest while KC Musgraves? Why this article?

I've been a fan of hers for a while.

Let's do.

Yeah, as you said, I think her first album was strikingly good and then I was really excited for

her second album and I was frankly a little disappointed in it. So the impetus for the piece was,

I mean, it was a tricky one, right? Because on the one hand, for anyone who is like going to

hear about KC Musgraves, you want to be sort of evangelical and be like, she's awesome,

you should listen to all our stuff.

On the other hand, for people who are more familiar or who are going to get more familiar with her,

...