Musgraves inspired by welcoming back love
New album touches on cultivating one’s own strength too
Kacey Musgraves pulls out her iPhone and starts tapping her way to a recent exchange with a friend.
“We were literally just talking about this last night,” she says. “Hold on — I want to see how I phrased it.”
The country star, 35, is an enthusiastic user of Apple’s audio message feature, which she says offers two advantages over regular texting: less time staring at a screen and the valuable emotional data contained in a person’s voice. “I can read a note from someone and think they’re mad at me,” she says. “But then I’ll hear it, and I’m like, ‘Oh, they’re not!’ ”
Musgraves finds the monologue and then zeros in on a section where she’s musing about how “there’s so much encoded in us from childhood — past trauma, past experiences — and all that goes into falling in love with someone.” She looks up and sighs. “It honestly freaks me out to think about just how much of chemistry with another person is beyond our control.”
The precarity of romance is on Musgraves’ mind because ... well, really, the idea is never not on her mind. “I’m always making something a little more sad than it needs to be,” she says with a laugh of her music, including on her breakthrough 2018 LP “Golden Hour,” which documented her whirlwind marriage to a fellow singer-songwriter, Ruston Kelly. Blissed-out yet laced with a stoner-ish melancholy, “Golden Hour” won the album of the year prize at the Grammy Awards, vaulting Musgraves from insider critics’ darling to pop-crossover fashion plate; three years later, she followed it up with “StarCrossed,” which presented the tale of her and Kelly’s
divorce as a Shakespearean tragedy. Now she has released “Deeper Well,” a new LP inspired in part by the act of welcoming love back into her life.
“Please don’t make me regret/ Opening up that part of myself/ That I’ve been scared to give again,” she sings in “Too Good to Be True,” her closemiked vocal swaddled by finger-picked acoustic guitar. Later, in the Celticaccented “Heaven Is,” she defines that place as “lying in your arms so safe and warm.”
Yet “Deeper Well” is also about cultivating one’s own strength through the rituals of therapy and self-care. In the title track, she sings about setting aside her gravity bong and learning the lessons of her Saturn return — a trendy astrological reference similarly deployed lately by SZA and Ariana Grande.
“Kacey just wants to grow,” says Shane McAnally, the prolific songwriter who has counted Musgraves as a friend and collaborator for more than a decade. “And this record feels like roots — like something you put down with your feet solidly on the ground.”
That goes for the
album’s sound as well as its outlook. After toying with the sleek textures of Y2K-era pop and R&B for “Star-Crossed,” Musgraves returns on “Deeper Well” to the kind of rootsy, handplayed arrangements that defined her early work.
“‘Star-Crossed’ was more hard-edged and acidic than all my other music,” she says. “It was more affected in terms of production. And that was fun to play with. But I was definitely craving something different for this.” What she landed on feels both cozy and exploratory — a homecoming disguised as a vision quest.
There’s an almost Zenlike quality to the sparsely arranged “Deeper Well” that makes even the tasteful “Golden Hour” sound busy by comparison.
“The small details define everything,” says John Janick, chairman and chief executive of Musgraves’ record company, Interscope Capitol Labels Group. “Each song is a delicate expression of self.”
Musgraves compares the album to “a walk through nature,” and there’s something to that in the way the stripped-down music showcases the essentials of her astute songwriting and her high, clear voice.
Does she ever regret writing so nakedly about relationships given that they’ve all eventually ended? (Some of the tenderest songs on “Deeper Well” refer to her romance with poet Cole Schafer, with whom she broke up last year.) Musgraves shakes her head.
“I think if you’re lucky you’re able to experience love several times,” she says. “Some people just have one. Look at my sister, who met her husband when they were 14 and 16, and now they’ve got a kid. Or my grandparents, who met in second and third grade — they’ve literally lived their entire lives together. I’m just different in that way. I’ve experienced many loves, and I just gather more information about myself with each one.” She smiles. “And then I write about it.”
Musgraves grew up in Golden, Texas, and started singing (and yodeling) as a kid in an oversize cowgirl hat. At 18, she flamed out on the singing competition “Nashville Star” but used the springboard to land work as a professional songwriter on Music Row; in 2011, she co-wrote “Mama’s Broken Heart” with McAnally
and their pal Brandy Clark then watched as Miranda Lambert turned the song into a No. 2 country hit.
Her success behind the scenes led to a major-label record deal of her own. Yet right away Musgraves was scraping against country orthodoxy. “Follow Your Arrow,” from her 2013 debut, advised listeners to “roll up a joint” and to “kiss lots of boys — or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into.”
“From Day 1, I feel like people have known exactly what I’m about,” she says. “Still one of the greatest compliments anyone’s ever paid me has been people in the LGBTQ community saying, ‘I’ve always loved country music, but I never felt like I was invited to that party until I heard your music.’ ”
Nashville is more inclusive these days than it was a decade ago thanks in part to Musgraves, who has maintained her efforts to diversify the industry, as with “My Kind of Country,” a competition show on Apple TV+ meant to spotlight talent from underrepresented backgrounds.
Still, she says, “I don’t feel like I need to be the spokesperson for country music.” In 2018, genre purists debated what it meant that “Golden Hour” contained a disco song in the shimmering “High Horse”; in 2021, the Recording Academy ruled that “Star-Crossed” wasn’t eligible for the Grammys’ country album category.
Musgraves finds all the gatekeeping a bit boring. “I just do my own thing,” she says with a shrug — including cutting “I Remember Everything,” her hit duet with Zach Bryan that won the country duo/group performance award at this year’s Grammys ceremony.
Six months after it debuted atop Billboard’s Hot 100, “I Remember Everything” is still hanging around inside the chart’s Top 10, which you can take as proof that the muchdiscussed country boom is real. But if Musgraves is always eager to reach new listeners — see her collaborations with Troye Sivan and Camila Cabello and her stint as Harry Styles’ warm-up act — she’s also wary of what she calls the “trap” of modern pop stardom, in which “people want you to be extremely authentic until your authenticity doesn’t align with whatever they want.”
On April 28, Musgraves launches a world tour behind “Deeper Well.” A couple of years ago, Musgraves would’ve viewed a tour as a welcome opportunity to leave home. She’d bought a big fancy place in Nashville, Tennessee, after her divorce but discovered that she didn’t feel comfortable there by herself.
“I was kind of scared of alone time — not scared, but trepidatious,” she says. “I’d get anxiety about being alone and not having anything on my schedule.” One night in 2022, she started perusing Zillow; she found a spot in the woods she liked and decided to live there instead.
Now she’s “gotten really good at being alone,” she says. “I actually feel recharged by it, which is the opposite of how I used to be.”