Songfacts®:

• Kacey Musgraves has spent much of her career drifting between stardust romance and clear-eyed introspection. "Dry Spell" is what happens when she parks the cosmic metaphors, walks into the kitchen, and decides to have a laugh at her own expense, preferably while the washing machine is on spin cycle.
  
  Written during what she describes as a 335-day stretch of romantic (and, let's say, extracurricular) inactivity, the song turns a potentially gloomy statistic into something closer to a raised eyebrow and a well-timed punchline. Where Golden Hour basked in loved-up glow on songs like "Butterflies" and the title track, "Dry Spell" is more in line with the wry, side-eye humor of "Merry Go 'Round." Only this time, the target is herself.
• The track opens with a verse that raised eyebrows online:
  
  It wasn't good anyway
  I'm so lonely
  Lonely with a capital "H"
  If you know what I mean
  I've been sitting on the washing machine
  
  At first glance, the "I'm so lonely, lonely with a capital 'H'" line doesn't quite make sense - there's no "H" in "lonely" - but the wordplay is intentional. Musgraves is playfully hinting at the word horny, using the capital letter as a cheeky substitution. The "washing machine" line clinches the joke, implying she's been left to handle things herself after nearly a year without intimacy.
• The song was inspired by the longest period Musgraves had spent single in her adult life, following her breakup with writer Cole Schafer. Before that, she'd been married to Ruston Kelly, which means that for someone who has often written about relationships - good, bad, and existentially confusing - solitude was an entirely new genre.
• "Dry Spell" examines the surprising upside of absence. Musgraves came to enjoy her singledom, noting that "for the first time, it actually felt incredible being alone and existing in a space not defined by anyone else." It's a sentiment that wouldn't have sounded out of place on "Deeper Well," where she leaned into calm, self-contained reflection. The difference here is tone: Instead of meditating on independence, she's cracking jokes about it.
• Musgraves wrote "Dry Spell" with Luke Laird, Shane McAnally, and Josh Osborne, who were key players in shaping the sound of her first two albums, Same Trailer, Different Park and Pageant Material.
  
  "It was really fun to be back in the room with so many of my old collaborators and friends: Shane, Josh Osborne, Luke Laird. Nobody does humor better than those guys, and I was craving humor again," she told NPR.
• Musgraves handled production alongside Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, the team behind much of her post-2018 work. The result is a fairly straight-down-the-line country arrangement that's twangy, uncluttered, and perfectly suited to a lyric that does most of the heavy lifting (and a bit of the spinning).
• The music video, co-directed with Hannah Lux Davis, takes the song's innuendo and runs it through a supermarket aisle. What begins as a routine grocery run - oversized hoodie, sliders, the universal uniform of "I'm just popping out" - quickly escalates into a visual catalogue of suggestive produce and suspiciously numbered signs, as if the entire shop has conspired to underline the joke.
• "Dry Spell" is track 2 and the lead single from Middle of Nowhere, Musgraves' seventh album. Its title was inspired by a sign in her hometown of Golden, Texas, declaring it "somewhere in the middle of nowhere." It's an apt setting: a place where not much happens, which, in this case, is rather the point.
• Musgraves had the title saved in her notes app because she was quite literally going through a dry spell at the time. When she found herself with some free time to write, she told her co-writers they had to tackle it that day.