Kacey Musgraves: The sun also rises

In January of this year, Kacey Musgraves was tripping balls in Nashville. High on a guided psilocybin trip, America’s six-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter was searching for something: a starting point; a muse to moor the making of her fifth studio record, which she was due to start working on in days.

In anticipation of this moment, she’d written several songs over a period of two years, privately chronicling what she calls “personal ups and downs”. But she was hoping to find a more crystalline vision before heading into the studio. She wanted to wipe the slate clean.

The then-nebulous record was to be Musgraves’ first since 2018’s Golden Hour: a work that transformed her from an anomalous artist in the typically conservative US country scene – vocal about sex, recreational drugs and queer love – into an arena-filling star with a global audience. It was a love story, written in the throes of her marriage to fellow country musician Ruston Kelly. Breezy and shaped by the dazzled infatuation she was feeling, it captured a similarly optimistic spirit, garnering mass critical acclaim and, eventually, four Grammy nominations in 2019. She won them all, including – somewhat unexpectedly to Musgraves, who became a meme off the back of her reaction – the coveted Album of the Year title. By the time she was picking up that prize, she had been exposed to the blessings (sell-out shows) and caveats (paparazzi following her on the street) of household name status. At the same time, she was figuring out how to respond to a marriage – the very one that inspired Golden Hour – that was beginning to fray. Eventually, in July 2020, she and Kelly divorced.

One thing Musgraves did know going into the studio: she didn’t feel the pressure to follow her successful fourth album with something even greater. “I accomplished everything I could have ever dreamed of with Golden Hour,” Musgraves tells me assuredly. “I felt like I didn’t really have anything to prove, and I don’t make albums for accolades anyway.” She’s calling from her home in Nashville, where it’s morning and she’s milling about, smoothie in hand. Her dark hair falls across her shoulders, and she adjusts it as she speaks, cordially and always correct: knowing exactly what she’s saying before it’s said, with no slip-ups.

Back home in January, as Musgraves settled into that shroom trip soundtracked by a seven-hour, specially-curated psilocybin playlist, the state of her life was on her mind. “Holy shit, it was insane,” she says, wide-eyed and looking back. Memories resurfaced of her childhood growing up in Golden, the traditional Texas town with a population of less than 200 people, where she first learned to yodel and play guitar as part of a kids group called The Buckaroos. As the hours-long experience unfolded, she gained a perspective on who she had become, and what had happened to her in the wake of her breakup. “It was life changing in a lot of ways.”

The day after the trip, she wrote in her diary, listening back to the playlist. Bach’s operatic Mass in B Minor played, and “like a lightning bolt”, it all came to her: “I opened my eyes like, ‘Tragedy – I’ve been through a fucking tragedy!’”

And so the seeds were planted for Kacey Musgraves’ next album (its title remains a secret): an ambitious record, formatted like a three-part Greek tragedy, that unpacks Musgraves’ experiences with glimmers of sumptuous, Shakespearean melodrama. She turned up to the studio as scheduled, and revealed the record she had inside of her all along, in complete chronological order. Two-and-a-half weeks later, it had been recorded. She compares its creation, and the songs that have made the final cut, to the grieving process: “denial, anger, sadness, depression, bargaining, guilt… [I’ve felt] all of those things,” she says with a soft sigh, looking off camera as she thinks. She reconnected with her own sense of ‘God’ and spirituality too; succumbing to “the religion of starting over and trying like hell to see beauty in your pain and then transforming that trauma into something useful”.

She’s intrigued to see how people process the change. “My last album is what people know me for,” she says. “They see me as this starry-eyed, rose-coloured glasses kinda girl; the Golden Hour girl. Well, here I come with a post-divorce album, bursting the fucking bubble.”

Musgraves has settled in Nashville, having spent much of the pandemic decorating a somewhat palatial-looking home. And as she talks and talks, unpacking her story often in scrupulous detail, you can tell she’s starting to feel comfortable. “I haven’t spent this long in one place since I was 20,” she says, head in hand, reflecting on a year both tumultuous and spiritually invigorating.

She is 32 now, and moving in the kind of musical circles that few artists who originate in country are welcomed into; a face of fashion house Moschino and a Met Gala attendee who also plays live shows to thousands in China. But to call her a crossover star is to suggest that she’s abandoned her roots, assimilating into a new style. She hasn’t, really. In some ways, Musgraves has been floating above definition since Golden Hour, which was entered into the Country categories at the Grammys but isn’t anchored by the tell-tale signs of the American genre. There are as many synths in its make-up as there are banjo plucks, leading Musgraves to dub it ‘galactic country’. “I’m a big patchwork quilt,” she grins. “You can cut [my music] up in a million different ways and still not be sure of what it is.” The subsequent record is equally abstract in categorisation. “Sometimes I feel like this album has more of a foot in country than Golden Hour,” she admits, though the myriad sonic textures may suggest differently.

What’s irrevocably country, and perhaps the real Kacey Musgraves calling card, is her unambiguous songwriting that strikes to the heart of what she needs to say. “She has a talent that’s timeless,” her friend and collaborator Troye Sivan tells me. “She strips everything back and makes you feel something, and that feel-good – or feel-bad – kind of songwriting is going to stand the test of time. It’s such a rare thing.”

On Golden Hour, Musgraves captured the effervescence of love with a wondrous optimism and clarity. But, this time around, she wrote songs about that same relationship’s dissolution, almost in real time, accepting the emotional blow. They are songs about self-doubt as a new wife, the raw confusion of later parting ways, and realising the single life isn’t as freeing as she’d hoped. But there’s also tracks about how her success, and women’s success, can supersede their male partners’. It is an attempt, she says, to capture “the push and pull of tension between sorrow and joy”, and is spun together with little metaphor to hide behind.

For the record, Musgraves reassembled her Golden Hour team, including co-producers Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian. “This time around, it felt like we were climbing a mountain, or digging a ditch,” Fitchuk tells me. His 15-year marriage was coming to an end at the same time as Musgraves’, and so they shared each other’s burdens in the studio. “It was a labour of love because we were working through such visceral moments in our lives.” If Golden Hourrepresented escapism, he says, this record is about “hyperrealism”. Her lyrics still paint vivid pictures, but the weightless euphoria has been cut with grit now, and a revealing melancholy – even if it’s about recovering from pain – marks almost every track.

Production-wise, the record places bittersweet songs like fados and buoyant pop tracks practically side-by-side; Japanese katos segue into jazz flutes into aggressive vocal processing. The thematic through-line is equally volatile, as humans in the grips of heartbreak tend to be: the tragedy starts with a bruised protagonist and ends with one significantly less so, but the journey to that point is shaped by setbacks and contradictions.

Musgraves’ frugal attitude is the key to why such sporadic ideas work. “My M.O. is to go as far as I can and then slowly start to peel some layers off and see where that perfect balance is,” she says. She laughs, saying it’s earned her the nickname of “axe man” in the studio. But it works: early in the album’s recording sessions, she forgoed the traditional booth set-up to record vocals in the control room with a handheld microphone; no monitors or headphones to hear herself back.

Tashian concurs: “She’s a minimalist,” he explains. “She doesn’t like there to be a lot of clutter or for instruments to step on each other… So it’s always a learning experience working with her.” He calls her “a great producer in her own right”.

Tashian recalls working on the record’s titular opening track – a pared back, Latin-inflected ballad about resigning from a relationship and accepting fate without bitterness. Fairly exposed at first, it swells into a pattern of guttural electric guitar, spectral strings and a chorus of voices. Recording it felt “like making a movie, and Kacey was behind the board directing”. Leaning into the drama of the record’s format, Musgraves says, lessened the pain that came from mining her trauma. “It’s weird,” she explains, “because the album ruminates on this chapter in an aerial way, but also under a microscope somehow.”

She’s now gearing up to revisit her older tracks and debut her new material in a live setting. “I’ve been grappling with the fact that I’m always going to have to sing Golden Hour for the rest of my life,” she says, sounding sombre and unsure. “I could choose to be an asshole to my fans and not sing it, but I don’t wanna do that to people who come dying to hear a song that they love. It’s about finding a balance between giving someone the show that they want and respecting my heart too,” – she holds her hand to her chest – “and what I’m handling.”

Time will be a healer. “I may have to disassociate a little bit when I’m singing the Golden Hour stuff, but I do think what’s cool about it is that, yes, Golden Hour was written about someone in particular, but the magic and the feelings of that time don’t have to die with that relationship. I’ll find new meaning in those songs.”

I ask what her hopes for this album are. Ten seconds of silence suggest she hasn’t thought about it yet, but she musters an answer. “In the modern world of celebrity culture, I think people can forget that [we] are humans too,” she says, slow and considered. “It’s easy to look at somebody’s Instagram and think they’ve got it figured out, but it’s never a depiction of what’s on the inside. Maybe it’s a reminder that you don’t know what’s going on in someone’s life, and we are all in this together as these little creatures navigating feelings and emotions on this fucking spinning planet. I dunno, [making this record] made me feel closer to humanity in some ways.”

Kacey Musgraves has, perhaps without realising it, made a brilliant and audacious artistic tragedy from a shattering of the stoic performance that was her outward-facing life. But she’s not nervous about judgement anymore. “It’s cool to be a part of people’s catharsis. That’s not lost on me, [but] if the entire world said they hated my album, I would still think it was good!” she says. “I’m not saying that to sound like a douche. I just believe in it, and it has my heart in it.”

It is, after all, like her mind on a mushroom trip, out of Musgraves’ control now. “I’m trying to trust in the idea that maybe there is a current and flow to the universe,” she says with a smile. “And if you stop trying to control it for a second, maybe all the right pieces will fall into place.”

The print magazine is free to pick up at over 600 stockists across the UK. Not based in the UK? Head to our online store to get your copy, and to shop the new Kacey Musgraves cover print.