On Kacey Musgraves’s New Album, Still Waters Run Deep

How does Kacey Musgraves spend her mornings? “Well, I’m currently in my kitchen,” she says, appearing on our Zoom call bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, dappled sunlight on treetops visible through the windows of the airy, light-filled room behind her. “I had a Greek yogurt bowl with some berries and honey. And now? Now, I’m talking to you.”

If a listen to Musgraves’s new album, Deeper Well, is anything to go by, Musgraves has been in a bucolic, yogurt-and-berries mood lately. (The title track begins with her noting that her Saturn has returned, while another song, titled “Heart of the Woods,” is an ode to her new home deep in a Tennessee forest.) It’s a return to the earth that feels somehow right. The 35-year-old country superstar, known for her razor-sharp lyrics and progressive values, has spent the past decade strapped to the rollercoaster of fame: first in Nashville, and then across the world, as her masterful third album, Golden Hour—a breathtaking feat of songwriting and sonic imagination that toyed with psychedelia and full-fledged pop—saw her become the crossover star she’d always wanted to be, topping charts and winning the Grammy for album of the year.

With Deeper Well, she makes a new pivot by stepping into the world of folk—albeit Musgraves-style. The opening track, “Cardinal,” begins with a “California Dreamin’”-esque guitar strum, before cantering into a ’70s groove that recalls Fleetwood Mac at their prime. She also cites the influence of Vashti Bunyan, the English folk singer-songwriter who wrote much of her best-known music while riding a horse and cart through rural Scotland; while the album artwork sees her in a fuzzy sweater, clutching a sprig of crimson clover. “I sort of had this vision of this pioneer woman putting her hair up after the breakup the last album [Star-Crossed] was all about, and finding her roots again,” says Musgraves. “And I love that cottagecore is having a moment! It’s an aesthetic I find a lot of comfort in. This is my cozy era,” she adds, laughing. Think: Golden Hour’s older, wiser sister, who may or may not be into crystals and breathwork and keeping a gratitude journal.

Photo: Kelly Christine Sutton

In conversation, Musgraves is also a touch more philosophical about making music. I ask her about the arresting refrain of the title track, which is anchored—in a nod to Emmylou Harris—by the lyric, “I found a deeper well.” It’s simple, but incredibly evocative, expressing a whole universe of emotion and life experience with just five words. As is true for all the best lyrics, it takes a beat to grasp exactly what she’s getting at—but when it clicks, it clicks. “‘I found a deeper well’ is just, like, I found things that fill my cup more, you know?” Musgraves says. “I think it can be really easy just to live your life in the shallow end and it takes courage and bravery to swim out to the deeper end, and get to know yourself better and the people around you better. I’m just in a phase where I would personally rather have less around me, but deeper. Does that makes sense?”

It does, especially after the past few years of her life and career. Her Golden Hour follow-up, 2021’s Star-Crossed, was a breakup record of dramatic proportions, accompanied by an ambitious 50-minute film that saw Musgraves as a lonely bride with diamanté eyebrows, strutting around the desert with drag queens. It also prompted heated debate about Musgraves’s position as a country artist, after the Grammys moved her from the country category to the pop category. (Musgraves’s response at the time was to paraphrase a lyric from a song on her debut album: “You can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.”) Yet Musgraves explains that she’s never really felt constrained by genre, and certainly not the notoriously strict parameters set out by country music’s gatekeepers. “If you look at the records I’ve made since day one, they’ve always been a huge patchwork quilt of so many different influences,” she says, breezily. “I don’t think I can even really say 100% what my own music is.”

Was there a eureka moment with any of the songs on Deeper Well, where she struck upon the rootsier sound she wanted to pursue across the rest of the record? “Oh, let me look!” Musgraves says, pulling out her phone and opening her Notes app. “I keep a running list of all the songs I’ve finished,” she explains. “Oh my gosh, there’s currently 114 on here…” She wrote 114 songs for the record? “Yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes it takes a while to get there.” Musgraves struggles to pick out a specific track that served as her entry point, instead ascribing it to an overall feeling. “It’s just where I’m at in my life,” she shrugs. “I feel more grounded than ever, and like my feet are really planted in the soil, so I can be more vulnerable. It’s messy, being a human. But it’s also fucking beautiful. I wanted to appreciate that beauty, and the ugliness too, the messiness, the flaws in myself, learning how to be better—all of that.”

What’s most striking about Deeper Well is Musgraves’s ability to take a grab bag of ingredients and references, and fold them effortlessly into the album’s (organic, wholegrain) dough so that the overall texture runs smooth. “Jade Green” might spin a Stevie Nicks-esque yarn of a talismanic jade bracelet over jangling guitars, but it’s immediately followed by the classic, stripped-back folk of “The Architect,” in which Musgraves—accompanied by a waltzing acoustic guitar—questions the presence of a higher power. “I wanted to reduce the palette with this record,” she says, likening the experience of listening to it to walking through nature “and occasionally stumbling upon some modern art sculptures along the way.” One such form might be the album highlight, “Lonely Millionaire”—a keyboard-led soft rock riff on Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”—which features some of Deeper Well’s most forthright (and self-aware) lyrics about being distracted by the shiny trappings of fame. “There were definitely some examples that I’ve seen of that in the industry,” she says of what inspired it. “But I saw a quote the other day that said something like, ‘The ultimate wealth is being in tune with the flow of nature.’ The ultimate wealth is already in you, you know what I mean? It’s not an outside thing.”

Still, it’s hard not to feel like the album is very much rooted in a sense of place. First, the pastoral paradise of Musgraves’s cottage in Tennessee; and then, perhaps more surprisingly, the heady atmosphere of Downtown New York. Musgraves recorded much of the album at Electric Lady Studios, which she suggests may have wormed its way into the record in some unexpected ways. “I find it ironic that I was able to sort of tap into a more inward-focusing country sound up in one of the biggest cities on the planet,” she says. “But I found it strangely easy to tap into the blank canvas in my mind there, with so much, like, outside stimuli—being in that white studio, but overlooking the busy street below.”

Photo: Kelly Christine Sutton

One of the tracks, “Heaven Is,” was recorded on the rooftop of the studio, hence the ambient noise of idle chatter and car engines you can hear in the distance; while the Celtic folk melodies weaving their way through many of the songs likely came about, Musgraves recalls, after a late night at an Irish pub. “I think there’s something kind of electrically charged about New York, with humanity being so stacked on top of each other,” she says. “Emotions are really magnified in an environment like that, where there are millions of people all in one area, all trying to figure out life together. If you’re really sad, or having a rough day, it’s comforting to know that there’s a good chance you’re not the only one in New York City that’s having a really shitty day. If you need a sad walk around Central Park, you can literally cry in public without anyone even caring. You can literally just do that! It doesn’t even matter.”

While Musgraves doesn’t go into specifics, Deeper Well also came about during a time of personal upheaval: falling in love for the first time after ending her marriage with fellow country musician Ruston Kelly—a narrative she previously threaded through Star-Crossed—and then the end of that post-divorce relationship. “I mean, these songs came from an extremely personal place, and I write them for myself because there are some things I can say in song that are hard for me to say in person,” she explains. “But as soon as they’re released to the world, they belong to other people—and I think it’s beautiful that we can share these songs, but in different ways.” And anyway, listening to Deeper Well, the idea that you’d need to know the details of her personal life to understand the songs quickly melts away. Their magic lies in their universality, and while it’s a gentler ride than Star-Crossed at first, it’s a record that rewards repeat listens: the seemingly still waters of Musgraves’s well run deep.

Just take “Anime Eyes,” the album’s penultimate song, which begins with folksy acoustic guitar, and seems to be a relatively straightforward ballad about falling head-over-heels in love. Then, a lyric catches you off guard: “a million little stars bursting into hearts” under “a Miyazaki sky.” Slowly, shimmering synths and vocoder backing vocals are introduced, and the song swells into a bridge where Musgraves reels off the depths of her infatuation, climaxing with a breathless: “Sailor Moon’s got nothing on me!” At the memory of writing it, Musgraves smiles. “It’s really crazy to listen back to something that you literally poured your heart into,” she says. “They’re all different chapters, but they’re all me, and they all led me to where I am now.” Right now? That’s at her kitchen table, in the woods.