Artist’s expanding universe
After two wry country albums and a Grammy breakthrough, pop stardom seems to be calling Kacey Musgraves
Kacey Musgraves made her new album in a garage studio buzzing with domestic chaos. On a recent afternoon, the singer and songwriter, 33, arrived there to find a basketball rolled into the driveway, tiny swimsuits drying on the porch and a spaniel, Bean, rooting around the percussion section for a stick. “I don’t feel self-conscious out here,” Musgraves said. “You can try stuff, and if it sucks, it’s fine.”
Musgraves was joined by a couple of dads, the producers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk. The trio first assembled at the studio known as Royal Plum to make her 2018 album, “Golden Hour.” They tried stuff, it did not suck and the outcome was better than fine: “Golden Hour,” an album of psychedelic-kissed folk, fingerpicked country yarns and a shimmering dip into disco, won four 2019 Grammy Awards, including album of the year, and lifted Musgraves’ profile from cult country artist to mainstream contender.
After three albums for country labels, “Star-Crossed” is a joint release with MCA Nashville and Interscope records.
There is a status anxiety that stalks country stars who flirt with pop, as if one genre is the provenance of authentic artistry and the other the land of losing touch and selling out. Really, the commercial demands of Nashville have always enforced their own restrictions on artists, especially women. And these days, with Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X and Bad Bunny redefining what superstars sound like, it’s pop music that is feeling more like the wild West. When Musgraves was asked if it was her ambition to become a big pop star, she replied: “What’s a pop star?”
Musgraves was born in Golden, Texas, a town of a couple of hundred, in 1988, and within a decade, she was singing in a Fort Worth youth group called the Cowtown Opry Buckaroos and breaking out with her own girl band, the Texas Two Bits. She wrote her first song — “Notice Me” — at age 9 and released a string of CDs with names like “Wanted: One Good Cowboy.”
Musgraves got a job as a staff writer for Warner Chappell Music when she was 21, sometimes writing multiple songs a day for a carousel of artists. She guesses she wrote a couple of hundred in the space of a couple of years, and she would eventually snag credits on Martina McBride’s “When You Love a Sinner,” Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” and songs for the cast of the soapy TV series “Nashville.”
But she kept some of her best material in her pocket, and in 2013, she released her debut album, “Same Trailer Different Park” — a witty, melancholy portrait of small-town life that turned her Texas pedigree on its head and managed to embrace both queer love and pot smoking without ever seeming to preach. Her 2015 follow-up, “Pageant Material,” struck more lyrical blows to country tradition.
“Star-Crossed” is the psychological hangover to “Golden Hour,” which was written amid her courtship and marriage to the fellow Nashville singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly. Organized as a tragedy in three acts, the new album charts the dissolution of that relationship, culminating in the divorce Musgraves filed for last year. She said Kelly has not yet heard the album, and the songwriting uncovered sentiments Musgraves hadn’t quite expressed to him or even herself. She started writing while they were still together, beginning with a gentle pop track called “Good Wife,” about stumbling over the expectations of marriage. “People have come to know me as someone who really speaks my mind,” she said, but she sometimes feels like she’s hiding behind a song. “Why is it easier to tell an entire crowd of people what I think than someone who is really close to me?”
There’s something achingly country about the whole situation. “I wasn’t going to be a real country artist without at least one divorce under my belt,” Musgraves waggishly allowed. But the album resists the worn emotional grooves of the breakup genre. As a listener, she avoids the vindictive breakup song and gravitates toward very sad ones that hit her straight in the guts.
Despite all the chatter about Musgraves going pop, the new album itself doesn’t feel engineered to be a world-conquering juggernaut a la Taylor Swift’s “1989.” But it is arriving with a “Lemonade”-like twist: Musgraves announced “StarCrossed” with a trailer for a glossy companion film that promises to tell the story of her broken heart. It features the singer in a wedding dress and bedazzled eyebrows, and its capacious aesthetic assimilates references to “Mean Girls” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” John Waters and Quentin Tarantino.
It feels like it exists on a different planet from the
Royal Plum, where Musgraves was plotting her next move: recording her version of “Try Your Wings,” a jazz standard by Blossom Dearie. But the more success she finds, she said, the closer she feels to her ultimate goal: “I’m positioning myself to achieve total creative freedom.”
Lately Musgraves’ Instagram feed has lit up with snuggly images of a new boyfriend, Cole Schafer, a poet who writes under the name January Black. They met when they spied each other across a crowded restaurant. “He did not know who I was, which I loved,” Musgraves said. The paparazzi, however, have been recognizing her more and more. “A handful of grown men come out, and they’re sweating trying to keep up with you on the sidewalk,” she said. “It feels very predatory.” Musgraves is still navigating how to become a bigger star without feeling like she’s the center of the universe. “Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed with how self-centered being an artist is,” she said quietly. “It just feels like me me me me me.”
It’s only in the past several years that Musgraves has acquired a form of performance anxiety, a slight panic that rises when the attention shifts unexpectedly to her. It first materialized in 2019, when she was filming her celebrity-studded Christmas special, and she was spontaneously asked to introduce herself on camera and offer her favorite holiday memory.
“I could not answer what should be the world’s easiest question,” she said. “I couldn’t get any words out. My heart was racing. I started sweating.” Sometimes, when she is sleeping, she has this stress dream, where she is being summoned to a faraway stage, and she can never seem to make it there in time. “And I’m like” — she curses in frustration — “they’re calling my name!”