Kacey Musgraves
Deeper Well
INTERSCOPE/MCA NASHVILLE
There are two very different and distinct Kacey Musgraves out there: the kick-ass, catty country cousin who wrote albums such as 2013’s Same Trailer Different Park and 2015’s Pageant Material, and the one who found sonorous, crossover pop-folk success with 2018’s Golden Hour and continues the charge for the mainstream with this week’s Deeper Well.
For the record, I don’t hate Golden Hour’s shift toward electro-pop or any other sounds disconnected from Musgraves’ country roots or folk and rockabilly limbs. Fully co-written by Musgraves and sung in her salty, sullen, and sunburst tones, Golden Hour was like listening to what a flower’s blossoming might sound like: close to open, bursting with wonder. Yet there was still room for rustically musical and sarcastically lyrical studies like “Butterflies” and “Space Cowboy” to be found amidst its swashes of Euro-disco and grand, sleek balladry. That record’s follow-up, 2021’s star-crossed, crossed over too willingly into slick production and pat cliché emotion, despite it being a post-divorce album.
And Deeper Well…well, there’s a fence to be sat on there that sometimes feels surprisingly comfortable, and sometimes feels painful—as actually sitting on a fence might. The Texan-born Musgraves leans into her homespun folk roots with mournful grace and the tiniest teardrop of tenderness on the likes of “Cardinal,” “Jade Green,” and “Heaven Is.” The tastefully decorated (and ominously lyrical) closer “Nothing to Be Scared Of” and “Giver / Taker” reveal a complexly told and delicate lyricism that surpasses even her finest-boned past glories. An elegant co-write with Shane McAnally, “The Architect” has enough guile to question reason and principle.
The promise of a return to her past’s glories, their subtleties, and a more nuanced look at love and loss detailed during the above-mentioned tracks is too much to hope for, however, in an overall setting. And no, I don’t need Musgraves to go backwards—not lyrically, and certainly not in terms of her arrangements when you consider that the regrettably titled “Anime Eyes” is a giddily explosive cartoon of romance and techtronics.
As she sings across Deeper Well, her Texas was a “world as flat as a plate / And that’s OK / The things I was taught only took me so far / Had to figure the rest out myself.” Which is fantastic, until you realize that what she’s figured on is something oddly lofty and often trite. Never before has Musgraves been trite. Do we need a reminder that money can’t buy you real happiness (“Lonely Millionaire”), or that you can’t trust any of the sentiments that fill her “Dinner with Friends” coming from anyone, let alone a lyricist who we know was once responsible for some of the most cuttingly incisive and downright witty social and personal commentary known to popular music? Deeper Well is closer to the bone than star-crossed was, but could use a little bile in its buttery mix.
