On her latest album, Same Trailer Different Park, Kacey Musgraves sets a new standard for country music. She just hopes the genre will be able to keep up.

Though Musgraves gives a few shouts out to all those trailer-park dwellers throughout her fourth album, she told Radio.com in an interview this week that there was no set theme when she first started. She just planned to write.

“I really just started trying to figure out what I wanted to say,” she explains. “And who I really am as a writer.”

The album wound up being a culmination of songs that Musgraves had been working on since she released her independent, self-titled album in 2007, back when she was just 17 years old. Though she was proud of the music she released back then, with Same Trailer, Musgraves wants to show that she’s done a lot of growing up since then.

“I had just graduated high school,” Musgraves explains about her 2007 album. “[Those were] the first songs I had ever written, and I felt like they might have been cool songs or catchy or whatever, [but] I’ve just grown so much as a person, musically, and personally since then.”

Since that time, Musgraves has moved away from home and had a few breakups, along with a few make-ups in-between. All of which have helped inspire her latest release. But it wasn’t until she met fellow songwriters like Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, who helped her co-write the album’s debut single “Merry Go ‘Round,” that she was able to fully express herself.

“I kind of found my stride,” she says.

Hear more from our Kacey Musgraves interview on Radio.com