KACEY MUSGRAVES : DEEPER WELL

KACEY MUSGRAVES : DEEPER WELL

Cardinal
Deeper Well
Too Good To Be True
Moving Out
Giver / Taker
Sway
Dinner With Friends
Heart Of The Woods
Jade Green
The Architect
Lonely Millionaire
Heaven Is
Anime Eyes
Nothing To Be Scared Of

Label : MCA Nashville / Interscope Records

Length : 42:02

Release Date : March 15, 2024

Review (AllMusic) : Consider Deeper Well the third act in Kacey Musgraves' voyage into her thirties, a chronicle begun with the besotted Golden Hour and continued with Star-Crossed. The latter told a sad story, documenting the fallout from her divorce to Ruston Kelly, a fellow singer/songwriter who served as the muse for Golden Hour. Delivered three years after Star-Crossed, Deeper Well examines Musgraves' continuing adventures in self-healing, offering a cycle of gratitude, contentment, and restrained wonder. Musgraves spends Deeper Well extolling the virtues of a simple kind of life, measuring happiness in terms of breakfasts at home, dinner with friends, and communing with nature in the heart of the woods. Although she gives an askance glance at a "Lonely Millionaire," counseling that "the things that shine can't buy you true happiness," the relentless soft focus and languid pace of Deeper Well can't help but carry the slightest air of luxury; her past success allows Musgraves the freedom to follow her bliss wherever it may lead. Sonically speaking, it brings her to territory that feels like something of a flip to Golden Hour. Instead of galloping through a series of new horizons, Musgraves stays still and watches the world turn around her, whittling away the brighter aspects of Star-Crossed, a process that also includes constraining her hooks. Apart from the opening "Cardinal" -- a message from the great beyond delivered with the slick pulse of a Laurel Canyon hippie trying on new wave wristbands for size -- and the sparkling "Anime Eyes," Deeper Well is filled with melodies that float and glide, unconcerned with snagging the undivided attention of the listener. Like the open-ended, amorphous production, the tunes all accentuate the record's general thrust of interior contentment. Musgraves, along with her regular collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, do manage to capture and sustain this delicate sensibility, creating a record that's every bit as pretty and memorable as gentle afternoon rain.

Review (Wikipedia) : Deeper Well is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves. It was released on March 15, 2024, through MCA Nashville and Interscope Records. The album was preceded by the release of two singles: the title track and "Too Good to Be True". To support Deeper Well, Musgraves embarked on the Deeper Well World Tour in April 2024. Commercially, the album became her best project in terms of sales in the first week of sales worldwide. In the United States it debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 while in the United Kingdom it debuted at number three on the Official Albums Chart, becoming the singer's highest entry on both charts. Musgraves teased the project on February 4, 2024, during a 66th Annual Grammy Awards commercial titled "My Saturn Has Returned". The eponymous lead single was released with an accompanying music video alongside the album announcement days later on February 8. Inspiration for the song came through change in feelings and sentiments that might be off-putting at first but equips one with "new insight and deeper love somewhere else". It was followed by the second single, "Too Good to Be True", on February 29. The music video of the song premiered later on March 15, the same day the album was officially released. Deeper Well was co-produced and co-written by Musgraves, with Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, with the exception of the tracks "Sway", which includes songwriter Tommy English, and "The Architect", which was crafted with Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne. Musgraves recorded the album at the Electric Lady Studios in New York City, which she thinks "has the best mojo" while she was "seeking some different environmental energy". It reflects on the changes and priorities that occurred in her life after the age of 27, spurred by the "cosmos as Saturn's return".

Review (Pitchfork) : You only have to listen to the last few weeks in pop music to understand that, yes, Saturn has very much returned. There are its icy rings barging into Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine in “Saturn Returns Interlude,” a brief explainer about the astrological notion that after the 29 years or so it takes for Saturn to orbit the sun, major life transitions may ensue. SZA begged its ammonia-yellow light to shine on her in Lana teaser “Saturn.” And now here is Kacey Musgraves, welcoming back the gassy giant to remind her that some people are givers and some are takers and she’s well shot of the latter on “Deeper Well,” the title track of her sixth studio album. The pro forma language of astrology, tarot, and therapy is all over the charts lately. These are great boons to the famous: ways for them to venture relatability without disclosure, and to make the listener feel centered in the music, too. While you, a civilian, may never know what it’s like to feel dogged by deuxmoi, I’m a Leo and so are you! On the endlessly pretty Deeper Well, Musgraves encounters energy vampires, boundaries, moon bathing, the mycelium network, the power of jade stone, and breaking patterns that no longer serve her; the song “Dinner With Friends” is a torn-out gratitude journal page. The wistful folksy vibe is very much “pottering around your local wellness shop picking up crystals and sniffing the hand-rolled palo santo incense.” Sageing my cynicism momentarily, these things seem to have genuinely helped Musgraves as a person, and all power to her. But as songwriting concerns, they wash out the erstwhile country radical’s incisiveness, her winks, her delightfully subverted cliches, and turn a beloved outsider into a solipsist. Once she’s sweetly bid “goodbye to the people that I feel are real good at wasting my time” on the second song, the world outside is all but gone. Deeper Well is Musgraves’ back-to-basics record after 2021’s conflicted star-crossed. Written after her divorce from fellow country singer Ruston Kelly, the lyrics were fragile and vulnerable but came in sleek pop packaging with Lemonade-sized ambitions. It didn’t connect in the same way as her 2018 psychedelic opus Golden Hour. You might imagine her next step to be another corrective, whether commercial or creative, but Deeper Well beats a further retreat. “I don’t care for money or fame,” Musgraves sings on an album that exudes disregard in its rainy-day strums and glazed vocal refrains. There are teases of more compelling directions not taken: Those lyrics are from highlight “Heaven Is,” which, like “Jade Green,” has the mournful formality of traditional British folk in its spindles. The influence of Nick Drake and Linda Thompson collides with Musgraves’ Texan roots on the yearning opener “Cardinal,” which unavoidably evokes “California Dreamin’”—but also the impeccable The Trials of Van Occupanther by her fellow Lone Star druids Midlake. It makes the idea of Musgraves striking out on a folk-rock quest over the existential plains sound extremely appealing. Instead, the understated music on Deeper Well fits its theme: Comfort and care are life’s biggest prizes and the fear of upending that careful balance is what keeps you up at night. (“I think about you often/Worrying that I might drive/The nail into the coffin,” from “Nothing to Be Scared Of,” might be the album’s best lyric.) When there are details, they are delicate: “Giver/Taker,” one of several songs about how all one really needs is love, is sparsely wreathed with banjo and cello and has an intricate beauty. “The Architect,” the lone song with Musgraves’ old core co-writer, Shane McAnally, sticks out for its nesting Russian doll structure, mirroring Musgraves’ worried spiral about whether there’s logic to the universe. Awareness of death hovers over some of these songs—“Cardinal” remembers a lost friend and wonders if a bird is bringing “a message from the other side” and the self-possessed “Dinner With Friends” loses some of its saccharine quality when Musgraves reveals that she’s imagining what she “would miss from the other side”—yet there’s rarely more than a shadow to the arrangements. From someone who flipped off the country establishment and vaulted beyond it two albums back, it’s perversely captivating to witness her sounding so cautious. The palliative “Sway” is about Musgraves’ desire to “let go” so that “maybe one day/I’ll learn how to sway.” The sunflower-bright wooziness suggests she’s got that licked. For an album predicated on having cast off the superficial shit, Deeper Well is frustratingly short on what happens when you really wiggle your toes in the dirt. On the title track, Musgraves remembers her curiosity as a small-town Texan kid: Her family had what they needed, “but the world was 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,” smartly acknowledging her pride in her roots and her instinct that the picture was bigger than she had been told. As a young woman she developed an expansive and discerning worldview that brought her this far, which gets a cursory nod in “Dinner With Friends” when she memorializes “my home state of Texas/The sky there, the horses and dogs/But none of their laws.” Her inquiring eye, once so sharp on hypocrisy and sanctimony, is now a bit rheumy. The midnight campfire strum of “Heart of the Woods” takes the fungal web that lets plants communicate as a toothless metaphor for how it’s human nature “to look out for each other … when there is danger.” It sounds like a dream because it is one. Similarly, the tastefully twilit (and unusually hooky) “Lonely Millionaire” finds a pop star reminding her listeners that money and diamonds “can’t buy you true happiness.” Deeper Well is the latest addition to a canon of refusenik pop records from young women burned by the spotlight: Lorde’s Solar Power, Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever, Ariana Grande’s post-2018 output, Hayley Williams’ Petals for Armor, Clairo’s Sling, even perhaps Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore. They are curious artifacts. It is entirely positive that we have started to reckon with the toll that business demands and grossly unfair scrutiny take on these archetypal figures. These records are often products and expressions of the therapy necessitated by that toll, embodying the revelations about quietude and self-worth that therapy so often suggests. Yet they still exist in a pop infrastructure and function, as pop unavoidably does in this moment, as celebrity texts. This creates some tension between why they’re made and who they best serve. Deeper Well is sympathetically fame-agnostic and focused on steadying Musgraves’ axis, but its emollient balms also aren’t particularly satisfying when you know what she’s capable of. I almost feel guilty for saying the poppiest song is the standout: “Anime Eyes” is as gorgeously weird as the best of Golden Hour, a paean to a lover who makes stars and hearts burst from Musgraves’ lashes as if they were besotted cartoon teenagers. It spirals skyward on a rapturous rush of memories that stumbles adorably, backed by Daft Punk-robotic vocal effects. For the length of the middle-eight, you understand exactly how it feels to be transformed by cosmic forces beyond your control.

Review (Indie Style) : ‘Deeper Well’ is precies wat de titel impliceert; Kacey Musgraves heeft genoeg van losbandigheid en is klaar om een ??groter, volwassener doel in het leven na te streven. Musgraves groeide op in een klein stadje in Oost-Texas. ‘Golden Hour’ uit 2018 betekende haar grote doorbraak. Ze raapte met de plaat meerdere Grammy’s bij elkaar. Met ‘Deeper Well’ brengt ze een evenwichtig, sereen album. Een groot deel van de nummers portretteren Musgraves die worstelt met een jongere, meer angstige versie van zichzelf. “I used to wake and bake“, zingt de countryster op het prachtige titelnummer. De voormalige wietverslaving van de 35-jarige zal voor de diehardfans geen al te grote verrassing zijn. Zo beweerde ze dat haar album ‘Golden Hour’ uit 2018 gedeeltelijk onder invloed van LSD was geschreven. Opvolger ‘star-crossed’ kreeg dan weer vorm na een paddotrip. Toen zong Musgraves vooral over huwelijksproblemen, professionele jaloezie, omgaan met herinneringen en weer verder gaan. De muziek ging veel verder dan gewoon country, met surrealistische elektronica en zwoele R&B. Op ‘Deeper Well’ klinkt ze veel zachter, emotioneler en minder eclectisch. Het album legt de nadruk op akoestische gitaren. Ze klinkt meer ingetogen en elk instrument schittert. Het is haar zachtste album tot nu toe, het tegenovergestelde van ‘star-crossed’ en ‘Golden Hour’. Zo is het titelnummer meteen één van de hoogtepunten. Ze laat de duistere energie achterwege, geeft de waterpijp op die haar elke ochtend begroette en begint met openhartigheid en kracht aan een nieuw levenspad. “Everything I did seemed better when I was high / I don’t know why,” zingt ze. Daarbij wordt ze begeleid door een akoestische gitaar die wordt onderbroken door etherische waterdruppels. Het meest poppy nummer ‘Anime Eyes’ is waarschijnlijk ook één van de meest bizarre liedjes uit haar hele discografie. Langzaamaan bouwt het nummer zich op om helemaal naar het einde toe te ontploffen. Musgraves somt ratelend haar gevoelens op. Het is het meest sonisch samenhangende album van Musgraves waarbij elk nummer uit hetzelfde zachte palet komt. En toch is er nog voldoende variatie om het van nummer tot nummer interessant te houden. Haar songwriting bevat nog steeds de acid trip-helderheid die ze vond bij ‘Golden Hour’. Op ‘Sway’ vergelijkt ze zichzelf met een palmboom in een stormachtige wind. Ze neemt de (mentale) druk op zich, maar bezwijkt er nooit onder. Het voelt een beetje als broodnodige uitademingen. Dingen die ze vooral voor zichzelf zegt en met ons wil delen. ‘Deeper Well’ is vooral een album voor regenachtige, weemoedige dagen. Hoewel er zeker ook een paar zwakkere nummers op staan, bezorgt Kacey Musgraves ons de perfecte soundtrack om ons uit onze collectieve overwintering te sussen en een mentale voorjaarsschoonmaak te doen.

Review (The Guardian) : 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.