Kacey Musgrave showcases her reliability

Kacey Musgraves shouldn’t work as a pop star, at least not one capable of filling arenas.

Her voice isn’t especially distinctive or powerful, simply a warm murmur with confident pitch. Her songs, most of them steady simmers, don’t scream out for either a cellphone flashlight raised in the air or dancing in the seats. Her stage presence is offhand and casual, with rambling tangents and corny jokes told as if her audience were a reunion of college friends on a girls’ night out instead of thousands of paying fans. Simply put, there’s nothing particularly outsized about the singer.

But in a way, that’s Musgraves’s sneaky strength. If the singer who took the TD Garden stage on Friday for the first of her two nights in Boston wasn’t overburdened with star power, exactly, she was possessed of something far rarer and arguably more potent: relatability. Rather than embodying the aspirations of her audience, she was the everywoman (albeit one who’s received a glow-up in all directions), granting permission to be in touch with their own feelings. “Cry if you want to, dance, be yourself,” she said early on. “This is a safe space.”

Musgraves carried the role well. With its circular 12-string guitar riff and Musgraves’s measured vocal, minor-key opener “Cardinal” was blissful and searching, ending with one of the night’s few moments of genuine stagecraft: Musgraves lying down on an artificial hill behind her band and then floating into the air, arms dangling by her side. (The other was her waving a ribbon wand as she paraded through the audience accompanied by figures in bear and horse heads while her band played something akin to a slowed-down Ren-Faire reel.) In songs like “Happy & Sad,” the promise and plea of “Too Good To Be True” and the soft swoosh of “Butterflies,” her voice was a magnet, drawing listeners in rather than pushing out to reach them.

Musgraves didn’t really raise her voice at all, in fact. Even on kiss-off songs “Space Cowboy,” “High Horse” and “justified,” her singing never got more emphatic, quite. Instead, she became more empathetic, as if it were a gear she could shift to the way other singers would simply go bigger. With a pedal steel providing atmospheric yearning in the background, “Sway” offered an easy thump as Musgraves sang with her heart in her hand.

But it wasn’t all placid adult-contemporary, even if it often seemed that way. Undergirded by a droning acoustic-guitar note, “Jade Green” played like a storm calmly brewing, and the one-two punch of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” (the first notes of which prompted an immediate audience freakout) and Musgraves’s own disco-driven “High Horse” merited the beach balls and confetti that accompanied them. Even “Lonely Millionaire,” with a hint of Sade in its lite-jazz simmer, was quietly roiling underneath the surface.

Like the last time Musgraves played Boston, the setlist essentially consisted of “[current album]” (in this case, March’s Deeper Well) and 2018’s Grammy-winning now-classic Golden Hour, with just two songs from elsewhere in her catalogue. (It’s easy to understand why she might not have wanted to revisit divorce album star-crossed beyond “justified.”) But one of the biggest responses came from one of her oldest songs. When Musgraves and two guitarists decamped to a satellite stage made to look like a grassy picnic spot underneath a glowing Saturn to perform “Follow Your Arrow” in a way that glided gently rather than skipping like the recorded version, the line “Roll up a joint” got less audience participation than the spirited “Or don’t!” that followed.

Near the end, Musgraves warned her audience that she wouldn’t be going through the standard dance of leaving the stage before an encore, saying “I’d rather be present in the real moment and not pretend.” And with only her keyboard player left on stage, she knelt atop the onstage hill and, with the help of the audience, sang the promise of hope that is “Rainbow” with a moonrise expanding behind her and a modest voice that was perfect for piercing the song’s heart. A more powerful one would have wrecked it.

Bluegrass refugees in much the same way that Musgraves is a country refugee, the charming (and disarmingly virtuosic) Nickel Creek opened with instrumentation befitting the genre that birthed them but with songs that pulled them in other, artsier directions. Father John Misty followed, lithe but commanding as he led his band through a dryly arch strain of cosmically dusky, dusty, empty-bar rock.

Setlist for Kacey Musgraves at TD Garden — September 6, 2024

Cardinal
Butterflies
Sway
Happy & Sad
Lonely Weekend
Lonely Millionaire
Follow Your Arrow
Heaven Is
The Architect
Giver/Taker
Jade Green
Slow Burn
Golden Hour
Too Good To Be True
Space Cowboy
justified
Pink Pony Club (Chappell Roan cover)
High Horse
Deeper Well