SIDETRACKS & DETOURS, Sunday, October 4th 2026: KACEY MUSGRAVES in the middle of nowhere looking for new roots and routes + preview Dire Straits Tribute On Lanzarote + Mark Knopfler feature + Rhythms Of The World + Claudie Huppe´s recent art exhibition

Lendanear to KASEY MUSGRAVES, MiddleOf Nowhere.

Is Middle Of Nowhere on the way to another Golden Hour.

Norman Warwick advises patience & caution

Middle of Nowhere,  Kacey Musgraves´ sixth and latest album (right) doesn´t compare with her best work. The album doesn´t reach the dizzy heights she has previously shown herself capable of. The above opinion seemed to be shared by most of the reviews I read on the album´s release, but Grant Sharples a writer, journalist, and critic. posted in Paste, our must trusted source, also added the caveat that this new release ´never quite sinks into a dreadful nadir´.

Kacey´s Golden Hour was a watershed moment, that Sharples considers ´a masterclass in pop songwriting´. That 2018 breakthrough album was also  championed on radio by Whispering Bob Harris  and certainly changed the industry´s perception of Kacey, promoting her out of a chorus of aspirants and rocketed her potential star power, a different beast from mere star quality. The genre-blending paeans to love, as Sharples called the songs on Golden Hour, received widespread acclaim, upgrading her tour itinerary from theatres to arenas. The album even won an Album of the Year Grammy Award.

It was bound to be a daunting task to follow up such an album and to perpetuate that new found reputation. Her work since that Golden Hour collection  has yielded diminishing returns, on star crossed  to the dregs of Deeper Well. 

Middle of Nowhere functions similarly, failing to reach the mesmerizing heights of the country artist’s best work while never quite sinking to a dreadful nadir.

Sharples says that Middle of Nowhere, sonically, shares some DNA with its predecessor´´.. Whereas 2021’s star-crossed seemed to have completely lost the artist´s country roots 2024’s Deeper Well offered a soft-rock dish. 

Middle of Nowhere offers tons of twang, but its pristine production value, courtesy of her longtime co-producers and co-writers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuck´s´ gives us sadly spotless sounds, disguising almost homemade  charm of Musgraves’ first two albums.

Where we end up, said Grant Sharples in his earlñy review, is somewhere transitional. As polished as Golden Hour but Middle Of Nowhere is lacking the dusty-layering of ingenuity. It shares some of the wit and mischief  of  her Golden Hour debut but is, as Sharples suggests with perfect accuracy,

´as rustic and innovative as a nouveau farm-to-table restaurant: there’s something for everyone, and the food’s pretty good, but nothing really reinvents the wheel.

Double entendres caught our attention in Dry Spell,  a song of sexual innuendo that was released as the first single off  Middle Of Nowhere.

Ain’t nobody to roll with in the hay

And nobody but the chickens are getting laid,

goes one couplet.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink chuckling is de rigueur for the biggest pop stars these days, and Musgraves is hitching her wagon to that trend.

It’s similar said Grant Sharples, to how her Saturn return felt banal when a bunch of other pop stars also gestured toward the cosmos for transcendence by way of platitudes.

Musgraves, though is an artist who once shaped the style of pop and country music, but who now seems to have become a back seat driver, giving lazy directions

which never sound confident of where she, or we should be going.  She seems, according to Sharples, to have  lost  the requisite charisma to offset its staleness.

The lyrics flatter to deceive, and although they  are fun and clever at first listen they soon  lose even their novelty.

If accepted as a tribute to her native Texas, however, Middle of Nowhere commands our attention. The occasional  pedal steel on the title track and on Back On The Wagon, performed by Dan Dugmore and Paul Franklin, respectively, coax the country colouring of Musgraves’ early days. Tashian’s plucked banjo on Abilene and Rob Burger’s trilling accordion on Horses & Divorces are vital forces that augment the songs’ lived-in settings. Musgraves’ syllable sprint verses on the penultimate Mexico Honey stumble off her tongue with the urgency of too-long held in emotion, as if she just can’t contain herself any longer and is ready to let it all spill out:

“Let’s keep staying up all night / Holding on so tight / Smile even though I know I’m gonna / Cry when I gotta leave.”

The clean-cut, shimmery pop, though, delivers a so-what  iteration of well-worn ideas. I Believe in Ghosts sounds like advert for bed linen and Loneliest Girl is a self-indulgent  love-done-me-wrong flipside

Musgraves,  for a couple of the best songs on the album recruits two fellow Texans. for the album’s two best songs.  Miranda Lambert’s appearance on Horses & Divorces is an homage to thier common ground (Texas, exes, etc.) that buries a hatchet into a years-old beef about a boy.

Another Texan shows up on the following track, as Willie Nelson accompanies Musgraves on Uncertain, TX. Together they create a smooth transition that carries over the spirited accordion and tacks on some twelve-string guitar and cowbell for good measure.

If you don’t know you’ve got it all / and your character is made of straw / you’re gonna blow away with the wind, they duet, using an actual Texas town as a springboard to bemoan noncommittal romantic partners.

So, yes, there are a few tracks to catch my attention but I realise that say that is merely damning her with a faint praise.  Perhaps had not I, and so many others, recognised all those years ago that we could not ignore what Sharples calls the unparalleled greatness  of Musgraves whilst admitting that some songs break up the drudgery, but Middle of Nowhere is mostly underwhelming.                                                                                                                                                           

There was something revelatory and magnificent in Golden Hour, and its vibrancy.

If Middle of Nowhere was not a Kacey Musgraves album, I would perhaps have not placed it on to my playlists. I might, instead. have written this off as an album that I would probably never want to listen again. My heart kept telling me, and Grant Sharples whispered that I should be a little more charitable, saying, even a lesser work of hers is decent enough. Sometimes staid and sometimes stirring, Middle of Nowhere finds her at a creative crossroads, in the middle of the road. 

There was also a nagging little voice nagging away at me, over my shoulder, reminding me that Dusty Springfield once stood In The Middle Of Nowhere and I never turned my back on her !

So this new album by Kacey Musgraves is still on my playlists and although only time and context will reveal its purpose and longevity, Middle Of Nowhere still stands as part of her canon of work and as a turning point, perhaps back towards the halcyon Golden Hour.

PREVIEW

DIRE STRAITS – BROTHERS IN ARMS 40TH ANNIVERSARY TRIBUTE SHOW

Multicines Atlantida ARRECIFE – LANZAROTE

130 min. Suitable for all audiences.

BROTHERS IN BAND

presents DIRE STRAITS BROTHERS IN ARMS 40th Anniversary Tribute Tour, a new international touring show that commemorates four decades of the iconic album Brothers In Arms and its subsequent tour, recreating in detail the impressive tour that took DIRE STRAITS to conquer the world during 1985 and 1986, with a spectacular staging and a carefully selected repertoire including the great performances of Mark Knopfler’s band of that unforgettable stage. Join BROTHERS IN BAND on a journey in his time machine and live the DIRE STRAITS experience like never before

JUST FOLLOW YOUR ART TO MUSIC

MARK KNOPFLER:

journalist, vocalist, guitarist,  poet, songwriter, story teller with Dire Straits, soloist singer writer, collaborator and local hero.

I have never seen Dire Straits perform as a group, and nor have I ever seen Mark Knopfler in concert. That has always been a sadness to me, as I always seemed to be wandering all across the arts in one part of the country, invariably at the longest diagonal from where Dire Straits or Mark Knopfler were performing. That sadness was perhaps mollified by the fact that I had a very nearly complete collection of all their albums and listened to them nearly as often as I would listen to John Stewart.

More recently I have watched The Sky arts documentaries that pitched Knopfler with artists like Cindi Lauper, and Emmylou Harris, although I was always disappointed by how shallow the conversation seemed compared to the duets performed.

I could have caught up on missed opportunities to see Dire Straits live by attending the above tribute band,….

but no, I have always valued too much the authenticity of music. However, I have purchased two tickets for the concert above at forty pound each (there was a time back then that I could have seen the real Dire Straits for less than that). Nevertheless, this gig is at one of our favourite venues; the cinema complex by the sea in Arrecife, the island´s capital. Furthermore the set – list is to be focussed on the Brothers In Arms CD that really introduced that recording format to the world.

We will, of course, be placing a review of the evening in sidetracks & detours.

Meanwhile, I will try to relate why I have finally given in to attend the kind of event I have tried to avoid all my life. Its all about the writer and his songs.

The most meticulous and gifted of craftsmen, Mark Knopfler is known to one and all as the genius guitarist, singer and writer whose new take on country, folk and British roots launched the meteoric rise of Dire Straits  and kept them at the top of the pile when music tastes changed. Knopfler’s vision never faltered. He wasn’t new wave and he was only briefly pub rock. His star was set much higher and his solo career since 1983 has given us gem after gem, from the opening salvo of his first film soundtrack, Local Hero, through to glorious solo entries like Privateeringand 2018’s Down The Road Wherever.

So come follow your art down sidetracks & detours that, like Knopfler´s guitar riffs, run through our lives.

A few weeks ago we received an e mail from a reader, Peter Pearson,(who would later become our Americana correspondent,  asking why sidetracks & detours had not yet filed an article on Mark Knopfler), an artist Peter considers a true poet among song lyricists. This following article was scheduled for posting today, long before we received that e mail. Some of our other regular readers will know that Peter is not a man to leave any stone un-turned and some will have read an article called Readers´ Writings, which served as response to Peter and as a promise to him that this articles was in the pipeline. The article also listed the eleven supplementary questions suggestions Peter included in that e mail, and we offered him our assurance that there would be another article coming soon to answer his points. So Peter, and all with an interest in Dire Straits, watch this space !

Of course, Solo albums and classic soundtrack work run parallel in Mark Knopfler´s life and he has also graced scores of other artists with his instantly recognisable, trademark guitar work. Scott Walker, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Sting, Chet Atkins, Van Morrison, Cliff Richard, Steely Dan , Randy Newman and Eric Clapton have all benefited from his quiet and graceful presence. His finger style expertise has him ranked high on Rolling Stone’s list of all-time great players and he is a four-time Grammy winner with so many other prizes to his name that we’ll just mention his honorary doctorates from UK based universities; his 2018 induction into the Hall Of Fame at the Scottish Music Awards (and Living Legend title at the same event); and the fact he even has a dinosaur named after him by palaeontologists who were listening to Dire Straits when they discovered a new species. Mark is no dinosaur, though. He is a forward-thinking, rapidly moving artist who matures by the year to the extent that his reputation simply soars above the commonplace.

With everything Dire Straits turning multi-platinum it was only natural that Knopfler would seek to broaden his horizons, and he delighted us with his debut soundtrack, the music for Local Hero. The heady blend of Celtic music, folk, pop and jazz was the perfect accompaniment to Bill Forsyth’s much-loved movie. Joined by Gerry Rafferty on one track and by specialist sidemen throughout, the score embodies the magical mood of this classic film and won Knopfler a BAFTA.

Having then produced albums for Bob Dylan and Aztec Camera, Mark’s next venture was 1984’s Cal, an exceptionally lovely and haunting score that incorporates Dire Straits and again provides the ideal instrumental backdrop to an idyllic film. Comfort And Joy followed the same year, another suite set to a Bill Forsyth, film while The Princess Bride (1987) – for Rob Reiner’s quirkily romantic venture – is a significant example of classic British film music in that era. The song ‘Storybook Love’, with lyrics by former Mink DeVille frontman Willy DeVille, received an Academy Award nomination.

The five-star music for Last Exit To Brooklyn (1989) is fully orchestrated bliss: ambitious and memorable from intro to finale.

After this Mark took a sojourn while his side project, The Notting Hillbillies recharged his creative batteries to return fully juiced and primed for a Nashville dream ticket with Chet Atkins, Neck And Neck. Then came a well-deserved compilation called Screenplaying, which cherry-picked his magnificent compositions thus far.

Oddly, it wasn’t until 1996 that Mark released what one might call his debut solo album proper. It proved to be worth the wait. Golden Heart conquered charts worldwide as the man himself recovered from the decision to end Dire Straits for the time being following a gruelling 15-month world tour to support their On Every Street album. Two years in preparation, Golden Heart evidently did the trick, because he was soon back on the road to support his new role. Guest players were of the highest calibre – as was to be expected – and included American giants like Paul Franklin (pedal steel guitar), Don Potter’s acoustic guitar and Sonny Landreth’s National steel. One can hear all that fusion of folk and US roots bubbling forth; it’s a heady brew that veers from pure country to the most exact traditional fare.

The deeply sardonic Wag The Dog movie found Knopfler back in composer guise, concocting a smart bedrock for Barry Levinson’s highly acclaimed political satire. Still using the ensemble he referred to as the 96-ers, Mark’s Metroland score (for Philip Saville’s evocative flick) was a gorgeous confection of original songs that transport the listener from 30s Paris to a near-contemporary London. To that end he tackled pieces by his beloved Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club De France. ‘Sultans Of Swing’ also crops up, as do borrowed tracks from Elvis Costello , Françoise Hardy and The Stranglers, helping to complete an authentic masterpiece.

Consistency is a valuable commodity in Knopfler’s work and his relationship with producer Chuck Ainlay is never better felt than on his second solo album, the silky Sailing To Philadelphia (2000), Featuring such guests as Van Morrison, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and the brass expertise of Jim Horn and Wayne Jackson. The title track itself is a duet with James Taylor that sets the scene on songs inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, about the two men who effectively created an imaginary border between the north and south in the US.

A Shot At Glory and The Ragpicker’s Dream (both 2002) continued to mine Knopfler’s own political concerns. It’s significant that he always chooses to add his musical tone to films he’s comfortable with and then graces those dark-room experiences with shuffles, honky tonk, ballads and often tense and taut pieces that enrich the audience’s appreciation even without them knowing – the consummate skill of the soundtracker.

Shangri-La (2004) was his fourth solo outing that has increased personal significance to me now. I moved to live here on ShangriLa Park in Playa Blanca on  Lanzarote in part because of my love of the James Hilton novel, Lost Horizon, that first gave us that name. Knopfler´s album included the beautiful and elegiac The Trawlerman’s Song among tracks that referred to a bad motorcycle accident Knopfler had suffered before recording took place. Even so, this is a joyous and pleasantly skew-whiff set that mixes such pieces as Boom, Like That (inspired by the founder of McDonald’s, the entrepreneur Ray Kroc) with cleverly nostalgic items like Song For Sonny Liston, Back To Tupelo and Donegan’s Gone, wherein country abuts skiffle and the listener is transported to a delightful place.

I actually included a piece on Donegan´s Gone in my series of articles published under the title of Their Name Fell Out In Conversation. It is a commemorative piece that has us tapping toes instead of shedding tears and is a glorious celebration of a great and influential musician-

An abridged version of this album comes with The Trawlerman’s Song EP (2005) which combines the title piece with live-in-the-studio versions of other favourites, recorded in one take at Shangri-La Studios, Malibu.

The Private Investigations: Best Of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler was branded to suit all parties before what transpired to be a very important release.

All The Roadrunning (2006), a collaborative effort between Mark and the legendary country singer Emmylou Harris was the result of a long-time collaboration between the pair, this extravaganza was seven years in the making and included rich and mature work from both artists with an exemplary country cast and some of Knopflers’s finest song-writing to date in the shape of Digging Up Diamonds, Beyond My Wildest Dreams and the title cut. Emmylou offers Belle Starr and Love And Happiness, and the whole thing was just that. A live memento of their ensuing tour, Real Live Roadrunning, ensued.

By contrast there is a darker edge to Kill To Get Crimson, whose noir-esque title recalls a period in English history, the late 50s, when time seemed to stand still between the austerity of the recent war and the imminent explosion of youth culture.

Another very desirable disc,  Get Lucky (2009), with its Anglo-American teenage title, contains phenomenal song-writing and fresh insights into other chunks of life and seems to make the transition from the monochromatic fifties to the more garish colours of the sixties if not the swinging type of sixties. Knopfler recalls some early youth in Glasgow and the North East and entertains with songs about gambling, poverty and British roots in general. Remarkable stuff.

The 20 original songs on 2012’s Privateering were wrapped around a meticulously clean and seductive sound that was completed just after a tour with Bob Dylan. As fine a slab of work as Knopfler has ever produced, its superbly intricate folk playing, unleashed rhythms and rock’n’roll are essential, and feature stellar support from harmonica man Kim Wilson (Fabulous Thunderbirds) and the ever-present A-team of Guy Fletcher, Richard Bennett and Chuck Ainlay.

Voraciously creative, and always working on his next masterwork by the time each new one appears, Knopfler supported Privateering with his usual extensive tour before unveiling 2015’s Tracker. A dozen new songs (with half a dozen more on the deluxe edition), were bejewelled with folk, blues, jazz and country influences, encased in Celtic tradition and Knopfler’s usual travelling-man wisdom on such tracks as River Towns and Lights Of Taormina. Ruth Moody lent her plaintive vocals to Wherever I Go and Knopfler doffed a cap to writer Beryl Bainbridge on Beryl.

His next soundtrack commission, for Hugh Hudson’s Altamira, landed in 2016. Then, fresher than people half his age could expect to be after embarking on yet another huge tour, late 2018 brought us Down The Road Wherever, a further reassertion that Knopfler has no intention to go gently down some nostalgic path. The album explored new territory with its addition of a mean horn section including Graeme Blevins (saxophone) and Tom Walsh on trumpet. Imelda May added delightful colour to the slinky Back On The Dancefloor while Knopfler’s dark and understated humour was to the fore on My Bacon Roll and Heavy Up. Gorgeous narratives such as Just A Boy Away From Home and the autobiographical Matchstick Man were further billboards for his highly literate, filmic eloquence. In March 2019, a new musical production of Local Hero, staged in Edinburgh, marked the unveiling of another slew of Knopfler compositions, as he challenged himself in yet another new medium to uniform acclaim.

His brief career in journalism perhaps gave him an understanding of linear narrative, a way with words that can twist them into titles, chapter headings and everyday catchphrases. Whether all that combines to make Mark Knopfler the poet that Peter Pearson proclaims him to be, I´m not yet sure,….. but I do know that his take on Shakespeare when recording his Romeo and Juliet with Dire Staits as perfectly caught the sounds of the street and its shorthand conversations as surely as ever did Shakespeare a few hundred years ago. Whereas Shakespeare had Romeo suggest ´Let´s Talk. It is not day´, Knopfler had him ask, ´you and me girl, how about it?´ we all knew what they both meant !

A modern master with an ear for the past and a driven itch to stay contemporary – that is Mark Knopfler. One of the finest guitarists of his time – or of all time – an incredibly underrated songwriter and a singer with emotional depth, he is a true artist. Any and all of the above albums are recommended. The man’s repertoire is an addictive experience. Enjoy.

+++ this article has been previously publsihed in sidetracks & detorus and remains in our easy to negotiate archives of more than 1,500 free to read articles.

REVIEW

The Language of Nature:

Earth, Water, Fire And Wind,

an exhibition in Haria by Claudie Huppe

She is an artist of the lost and found, creating and recreating in her art the island she loves.

Claudie Huppe´s most recent exhibition closed on Friday 2nd October 2026. She is our favourite working-artist on the island and the walls of our rooms at home are adorned by her always intriguing works, and my bookshelves in my office, and on  my desktop, too, are sites for her work.

When I am thinking hard, (or dozing as Dee calls it) or am looking for inspiration for my next piece of writing I find myself gazing intensely at her art. I have come to look upon her as a shining example, possessing and cherishing the ethics that see her hunting and gathering, learning from  the climate and colours and delights and detritus of  Lanzarote

The Language of Nature: Earth, Water, Fire And Wind was her most recent exhibition and was housed in the Aliji in Haria in the Northern heights of the island. It was a a stunning exhibition and absolutely reflected her own artistry, dedication and love of the island,

We managed to catch the penultimate day of the event and we were made to feel quite privileged when she introduced us to three lovely people, friends admirers and customers all, and between us we managed to construct a lengthy conversation, in various languages, that actually came to be about what we all loved about Lanzarote and how Claudie´s art so captures the views and the values of the island. It was quite special to feel that we had made some new friends, with whom we also shared a love of not only Claudie´s art but also The Arts (and Culture.) of the island that her art presents, and represents.

The first time we ever saw her work on show, about ten years ago now, was in the church near the marina in Playa Blanca, a Tardis-like building with rooms and nooks and crannies that seemed so much larger than the white walls of the exterior

Most of our visits to her exhibitions were installed in her home gallery and I guess some of her larger canvases and pieces were stored away. That didn´t really matter to us, because she had serviced her smaller works with the same ethics. In fact we now have around twenty framed pieces she calls sea-glass and we have purchased some others to send across to our son and his wife and daughter in South Korea.

This building in Haria, albeit a strangely eerie underground room, allowed plenty of space for Claudie to display her larger works. She paints, she draws, and even occasionally adds objets trouve as a finishing touch. Her ´abstract´ paintings are often of long, wide flowing, luxurious, brush strokes but very often there might be a hidden point on the canvas that makes us wonder what the piece is really about. The consumate professional that Claudie is ensured that twenty to thirty large paintings stretched around the four walls. In one corner of the room she had installed a screen showing an infoirmative film / power point that showed her not only resourcing itemsd off the beach that might prove useful. It also showed her at work on some of the art works that were part of this exhibition of Earth, Water , Fire and Wind that evidenced Claudie´s ability to speak The Language Of Nature, from imagination to creation.

Claudie has to divide her time between constructing new art work and then marketing that new art work. On some occasions, of course, she has not only to create her exhibitions, but also curate them and manage them.

Sometimes, whenever I urge people to follow their art, I have to make a note to self to follow that my own advice. . Seeing Claudie´s excellent presentation in Haria was evidence that she always follows her art and anyone knowing her work is grateful that she does. Hence the purchase of three or four items we made on the day.. Thanks, Claudie

However, allow me to make one more observation. An important tool in Claudie´s skill set is that she engages people and loves nothing more to introduce people to each other at her exhibitions and then throw an opening sentnece to a conversation between us all that she will steer for a few minutes before fiding a job needing do elsewhere in the gallery. Those of us who have only just been introduced to each other hardly notice her going, as we are so deep in conversation about her work, and how much hard work it must be, but how rewarding and we alweasy end up speaking of how refelctive of Lanzarote. So, we learn more about art ingeneral, Claudie´s in particular and we learn about each other. The three lovely people, one of them a dog psychiatrist, that we speaking with lived in Tabayesco, a beautiful village two thirds up, or one third down that Dee and I used to drive to just to look at its glorious views, but when turned seventy a few years ago my wife banned me from driving on that narrow, steep, bendy road, so it was nice to learn from these people that the village is as beautiful as ever and its panoramic views remain magnificent. And it was fantastic to remind ourselves that whenever I set off to follow my art we invariably run into Claudie and see her views of the island, take some of thios e views back home with us and makew new friends along the way.

We will always try to preview any exhibition by Claudie so that you can follow your art to what are invariably rewarding events.s.