Deeper Well by Kacey Musgraves
While other female singer-songwriters with country & western inclinations have openly or quietly forsaken neo-Nashville “rules,” Kacey Musgraves used the Album of the Year Grammy she won for 2018’s Golden Hour—and a divorce—as a fulcrum to pivot to 2021’s prettified and glittery Star-Crossed.
Musgraves breezes back toward Americana with her fifth LP, Deeper Well, but her breeziness carries sly reminders of her pop discoveries into the newer music. Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, her co-producers and co-writers from Star-Crossed and Golden Hour, keep ensuring that she sounds as though she’s turning into the wind rather than against it.
Yet the truest wind to guide her is her own breath: a lithe voice able to curl up and make a home inside any musical place it chooses. Her sensuous phrasing can renew the emotion and meaning of a cliché like “Too Good to Be True,” with considerable support from a folk-pop melody that hints at both bliss and melancholy.
Musgraves similarly intertwines regret and hope with the softer, more uptempo acoustic fingerpicking and synthesizer splashes of the title track; dwells upon the little joys of everything from Texas skies to the smell of a lover’s clothes amid the hop-skip strumming of “Dinner with Friends”; and dips into the darker end of her vocal range while Byrdsian guitar chimes outline the scarlet suddenness of the “Cardinal.”
Although she doesn’t flash the gaudier shine of Star-Crossed, she touches upon Andrew Bird’s indie-backwoods whimsy on “Heart of the Woods” and widens her romantic gaze to witness the excitable “rainbow explosions” of Katy Perry and Gwen Stefani colors in “Anime Eyes.”
If Kacey Musgraves has not entirely tacked toward prevailing musical air currents, Deeper Well indicates that she’s got enough creative wind and water at her back to make the journeys her heart and mind desire.
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Get Deeper Well at Amazon here.
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