One only has to listen to the last few weeks in pop music to realize that, yes, Saturn has a lot They came back. There are his frozen rings that go into Ariana Grande's eternal sunshine in “Saturn Returns Interlude”, a brief explanation of the astrological notion that after about 29 years it takes Saturn to revolve around the sun, major life transitions it may occur. SZA begged for the ammonia yellow light to shine on her Wool “Saturn” teaser. And now here's Kacey Musgraves, welcoming back the aerial giant to remind her that some people give and some take, and she's got the latter on “Deeper Well,” the title track of her sixth studio album.
The pro forma language of astrology, tarot and healing is all over the boards lately. These are big advantages for celebrities: ways they can attempt credibility without being overt and make the listener feel focused on the music as well. While you, a civilian, may never know what it's like to feel pressured by the deuxmoi, I'm a Leo and so are you! In the endlessly beautiful Deeper well, Musgraves encounters energy vampires, boundaries, moonswimming, the mycelium network, the power of the jade stone, and breaking patterns that no longer serve her. the song “Dinner With Friends” is a torn page of a gratitude journal. The sad folk vibe is very “hanging around your local health shop picking up crystals and smelling the palo santo incense with roll in hand”. Raising my cynicism momentarily, these things seem to have really helped Musgraves as a person, and all the power to her. But when it comes to songwriting, they wash away the old country radical's acuity, her glances, her delightfully subversive clichés, and turn a lovable outsider into a solipsist. Once she sweetly says “goodbye to the people I feel are too good at wasting my time” in the second song, the world outside is gone.
Deeper well it's Musgraves' record back to basics after the 2021 clashes crossed stars. Written after her divorce from fellow singer Ruston Kelly, the lyrics were fragile and vulnerable, but came in a stylish pop package with Lemonade– size ambitions. It didn't connect in the same way as her 2018 psychedelic work Golden Hour. You can imagine her next step is another corrective, either commercial or creative, but Deeper well beats a further retreat. “I don't care about the money or the fame,” Musgraves sings on an album that oozes contempt in its drizzly strums and slick vocal choruses. There are teases of more exciting directions not taken: These lyrics are from highlight “Heaven Is,” which, like “Jade Green,” has the mournful solemnity of traditional British folk at its core. The influence of Nick Drake and Linda Thompson collides with Musgraves' Texan roots on the wistful opener “Cardinal,” which inevitably harks back to “California Dreamin'” — but also the flawless The Trials of Van the Conqueror from fellow Lone Star druids Midlake. It makes the idea of Musgraves singling out a folk-rock quest across the existential plains sound extremely appealing.
