Eleven years ago, when Kacey Musgraves released her debut album “Same Trailer Different Park”, she easily could be mistaken for a run of the mill country artist singing about love, small town life, and her home state of Texas. However, even then, Musgraves infused her melodies with a unique focus on womanhood and politics, setting her apart from her musical peers. Now, though her life and genre have undergone substantial changes, those same messages still underlay her art.
“Deeper Well” is an understated and ethereal collection of songs in which she returns from her synthy 2021 album “star-crossed” to the poetic and acoustic style of her earlier work. However, in this new album, Musgraves seamlessly leans into a new genre, both in instrumentation and lyrics: folk. Even the title of the album and leading track are a nod to her iconic predecessor Emmylou Harris, a female folk singer who was a pioneer for women in the music industry.
Similarly to “star-crossed”, “Deeper Well” is full of references to Musgraves’s divorce from country singer Ruston Kelly, but approaches it in an entirely different way. In “Dinner With Friends”, one of the highlights of the album, Musgraves sings in a way that resembles a gratitude journal, displaying a much more optimistic and rooted approach to her grief than that seen in her previous album. Chock-full of references to nature (moon bathing, jade stone, etc.), “Deeper Well” finds Musgraves serene and pensive as she uncovers the implications of lost love and stardom, and seamlessly weaves these themes into a wistful yet hopeful album.
Despite the way that her new album derives thematically and musically from her previous work, Musgraves doesn’t let go of one aspect of her work that has been a trademark from the beginning, and continues to sneak political messages into her lyrics in a way that it sometimes takes a few listens to even pick up on. In “Follow Your Arrow”, Musgraves’s first hit single, she proclaimed her support for homosexuality, telling her listeners to “Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls/If that’s something you’re into.” Even more radically, Musgraves proclaims her support for recreational marijuana in the chorus, something that wouldn’t be legalized in Texas for two more years. She continues to challenge her home state’s legislation in the first verse of “Dinner With Friends”, proclaiming her love for “My home state of Texas/The sky there, the horses and dogs/But none of their laws.”
Managing to create something unique and fresh while at the same time maintaining the charm of her old work, Kacey Musgraves has hit a home run with “Deeper Well”. Relevant and poignant, sweet and slyly political, “Deeper Well” is arguably her best work since “Golden Hour”, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2019. Through this album, Musgraves has shown her enormous fan base her ability to adapt and self-explore without losing the elements of her previous work that set her apart.
