Country cowgirl Kacey does a Taylor Swift
SHE cut her teeth as a dime-store cowgirl in Nashville and her home state of Texas, but Kacey Musgraves has always been happy to upset the country establishment. Her first two albums — 2013’s Same Trailer Different Park and 2015’s Pageant Material — were musically traditional, but she’s gone on to blend rock, disco and electronics in a mix she calls ‘galactic country’.
For her fifth LP, she’s taken a leaf out of Taylor Swift’s book. When Swift made 1989, her first ‘official pop album’, she moved from Nashville to The Big Apple and opened the record with a song called Welcome To New York.
Musgraves is now following suit: she made Deeper Well in the city’s fabled Electric Lady Studios, made famous by Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder.
The singer, 35, says she was seeking ‘a different environmental energy’, and Deeper Well maintains her admirable habit of doing something fresh with each release. The onus this time is on soft vocal harmonies and lush acoustic arrangements. If there’s a musical connection to New York, it’s in the legacy of reflective singer- songwriters such as Carly Simon, Carole King and Simon & Garfunkel.
When Musgraves made her last album, Star-Crossed, she was still reeling from her 2020 divorce from fellow country star Ruston Kelly. A tale of ‘two lovers ripped right at the seams’, it was an emotionally bruised break-up record. She’s now more footloose and fancy-free and these songs are the calm after the storm, but she still has an ear for a stinging couplet and a respect for countrystyle storytelling.
The New York backdrop is apparent on Nothing To Be Scared Of, set on Manhattan’s West Side. The city is in the frame again on Too Good To Be True. The latter has a lilting melody based on US singer Anna Nalick’s
2004 single Breathe (2 AM), and it finds Musgraves taking a new lover to New York: ‘Made some breakfast, made some love… this is what dreams are made of on a cloudy Monday morning.’
Elsewhere, helped by regular producers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, she sings of the importance of love over money (Lonely Millionaire) and not letting the bad times grind you down (Sway). Her songs grow more stripped-back as the album develops, but her voice retains its powerful, creamy timbre. When she first emerged, fellow Texan Willie Nelson hailed Kacey as a huge talent. She went on to win the prestigious Album Of The Year Grammy for 2018’ s Golden Hour, and is now building further on that promise.
■ A NEW album hadn’t originally been on the cards this year for Ariana Grande. Having landed a lead role in the upcoming film adaptation of the stage musical Wicked alongside Cynthia Erivo, she intended to focus on acting. But, with time on her hands due to strike action in Hollywood, she unexpectedly found herself back in the studio.
With her two-year marriage to real estate agent Dalton Gomez having ended in divorce, and a new relationship with her Wicked co- star Ethan Slater in bloom, Grande also has plenty to sing about. And yet, her seventh solo album, Eternal Sunshine, is frustratingly patchy.
Grande, 30, has one of the best voices in pop — a silky, multioctave instrument that seems to flutter weightlessly above her songs. She can handle Broadway ballads and atmospheric R&B numbers. She won legions of admirers, too, for her dignified response to the Manchester Arena atrocity that claimed the lives of 22 of her fans in 2017.
But Eternal Sunshine is a record of brilliant moments rather than consistent excellence. Dominated by slow, sophisticated rhythms, its mellow songs don’t take flight in the same way as 2018’s playlistfriendly Sweetener or 2019’ s Thank U, Next.
She wastes no time in addressing her romantic status. ‘How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?’ she asks on Intro (End Of The World). She goes on to tackle online gossip-mongers on True Story. ‘I’ll play the bad girl if you need me to,’ she shrugs. But these understated songs, unusually for her, lack emotional punch.
She fares better when she ups the tempo. Bye harks back to glossy 1970s soul, and the irresistible Yes, And? addresses the romantic rumour mill with all the aplomb of one of Madonna’s timeless clubland classics. A second version of the latter track, sung as a duet with Mariah Carey and included on an expanded edition of this album, is a real tour de force. If only she would let loose more often.
Kacey Musgraves starts a UK tour on May 9 at O2 Academy Glasgow (axs.com).