Kacey Musgraves has put the bong down. “I used to wake and bake,” croons the country crossover star on her sixth album’s transcendentally gorgeous title track. “Everything I did seemed better when I was high, I don’t know why.” The 35-year-old’s erstwhile weed habit won’t come as a huge surprise to fans: she claimed her 2018 album Golden Hour was partly written under the influence of LSD, while its follow-up Star-Crossed took shape after a guided psilocybin mushroom trip. Yet on Deeper Well – an album teeming with 60s folk energy and a sense of crunchy, tree-hugging wonder – Musgraves still sounds like she’s tripping. Her drug of choice this time round? Love: new, true and self.
Musgraves, as you may have surmised, is not your run-of-the-mill country singer, and hasn’t been for some time. A rare example of a Nashville stalwart who achieved recognition this side of the Atlantic, she became a breakout star in the 2010s, famous for her spiky portraits of small-town life and vocal support for the LGBTQ+ community. On Golden Hour, an extended love letter to her then husband, she incorporated electropop and disco into her palette, winning the Grammy for album of the year. Star-Crossed, inspired by her subsequent divorce, was a restrained and, for some, anticlimactic sequel, yet it cemented her standing as a mainstream artist able to thrive outside her original country context while retaining the genre’s sonic markers – a trajectory not dissimilar to pop overlord Taylor Swift’s.
Unlike Swift, Musgraves is far more focused on channelling vibes than chart domination. On Deeper Well, she seems newly unburdened – by expectations of a post-Golden Hour blockbuster; by country music limitations; by reliving her breakup – and is now luxuriating in healing, back-to-nature goodness, gilded with a distinctly millennial air of self-care (there are references to Saturn returns and jade crystals). It’s a mindset echoed in the record’s mountain-air sound, all new-wave Americana meets Simon and Garfunkel-style acoustic guitar, the kind that seems to gently trip over itself. Opener Cardinal, a shimmering, instantly infectious meditation on grief, hope and cosmic love, could be mistaken for a lost Fleetwood Mac classic.
The highs on Deeper Well are immensely high – these are two of the most satisfyingly beautiful songs you’ll hear all year. Yet elsewhere Musgraves’s attempts to channel earnest simplicity fall spectacularly flat, with dashed-off literality masquerading as profundity. She marvels sentimentally at the engineering of an apple on the irritatingly twee The Architect and descends into inadvertently amusing basicness on Dinner With Friends, which features an amazingly banal eulogy to her “home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs”. (It is admittedly followed up by “but none of their laws”, a rare moment of progressive bite.)
It soon becomes apparent that instead of a woo-woo declaration of independence, this album is partially in thrall to a giddy romance (apparently since concluded), which might be why Musgraves sounds so dumbly infatuated with the world at large. Halfway through Dinner With Friends, her vague effusiveness is redirected towards the loveliness of her partner – a subject the album returns to like a moth to a flame, with mixed results. It’s cute on the psychedelic folk-pop of Anime Eyes, which riffs on the tropes of the Japanese genre before crescendoing in a breathless run of references (“Sailor Moon’s got nothin’ on me!”). Yet too many songs feel like the audio equivalent of a fake-candid couple’s selfie, as Musgraves waxes lyrical about her romantic bliss in the most unimaginative terms. “Made some breakfast, made some love, this is what dreams are made of” goes the underwhelming Too Good to Be True. The accompanying tunes don’t make up for it: Musgraves’ crystalline vocals and classy toplines sell some interchangeable folk-country balladry, but it can all still stray into blandness (although special mention has to go to Lonely Millionaire’s irresistibly sultry 90s neo-soul).
It’s rare to hear an album that scales such songwriting peaks with the spectacular one-two of Cardinal and Deeper Well before flopping back into total blah-ness. This album proves the line between sublime simplicity and vacant banality can be surprisingly thin.
