FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Eric Ray Davidson for GQ
Part Fifty-Two: Kacey Musgraves
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IN this Modern Heroines feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: Drew Gurian/Invision/AP
I am looking at an artist I have featured a few times before. Kacey Musgraves is one of the most astonishing and versatile artists in the world. I want to pull quite heavily from a recent interview in Rolling Stone. I will also drive into reviews of her current studio album, Golden Hour ((2019), and an interview conducted around the time. Before then, a quick overview of the incredible Musgraves:
“Kacey Lee Musgraves (born August 21, 1988) is an American singer and songwriter. She has won six Grammy Awards (including the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2019), seven Country Music Association Awards, and three Academy of Country Music Awards. Musgraves self-released three solo albums and one more as Texas Two Bits, before appearing on the fifth season of the USA Network's singing competition Nashville Star in 2007, where she placed seventh.
She later signed to Mercury Nashville in 2012 and released her critically acclaimed debut album Same Trailer Different Park in 2013. Her debut won the Grammy Award for Best Country Album. The album's lead single "Merry Go 'Round" won her the Grammy Award for Best Country Song. It also featured the platinum certified single "Follow Your Arrow" which won her the Country Music Association Award for Song of the Year. In 2015, she released her second studio album Pageant Material (2015). Her sophomore effort also received critical acclaim and a Best Country Album Grammy nomination. Musgraves also released a Christmas-themed album, A Very Kacey Christmas, in 2016.
Her fourth studio album Golden Hour (2018) was released to widespread critical acclaim and won all four of its nominated Grammy Award categories, including Album of the Year and Best Country Album. The album's first two singles, "Butterflies" and "Space Cowboy", won Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Song, respectively. Golden Hour also won the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association Award for Album of the Year, making Musgraves only the fifth artist to win all three major Album of the Year (Grammy, CMA and ACM) awards for the same album as well as the second artist to win the Grammy, CMA, ACM and all-genre Grammy Album of the Year”.
Quite a lot has happened in Musgraves’ life since 2019. Unfortunately, her marriage to Ruston Kelly was ended last year. Quite a few songs on Golden Hour were inspired by Kelly. That said, I wanted to go back and investigate a fantastic album. Before sourcing from a couple of reviews, it is worth highlighting a few segments from an NME:
“It was also inspired by an even more elusive and intoxicating drug: love. Back when she first started writing the record in Nashville, Musgraves went along to a songwriters’ showcase at the Bluebird Cafe to see a friend and by chance caught a performance by a singer-songwriter named Ruston Kelly. The pair got to talking and a few months later he went over to her house to write a song. You can see where this is going. They married in October 2017.
Musgraves’ relationship with Kelly inspired several songs on the album, including ‘Butterflies’ and stand-out track ‘Oh, What A World’ which manages to combine the sense of falling in love with the feeling of tripping on acid. “That song started as a love letter to a person but also to humanity and nature and spirituality,” says Musgraves. “I had met the right person and I was falling in love while learning how to love myself more which gave me a more compassionate feeling towards humanity and the world.”
“Musgraves has always had a voracious musical appetite. As a child her parents played her a lot of Neil Young, which she loved just as much as the ’90s pop and R&B her friends were into. She was born on 21 August 1988, a month early – she arrived on the day of her mother’s baby shower, so has apparently always liked a party – in the aptly named town of Golden, Texas. Once known as the sweet potato capital of the state, the crop has dried up in recent years but that hasn’t stopped Golden hosting a Sweet Potato Festival every October. Musgraves played it back in 2012. “My mom is already asking me if I can make it this year,” she says, in a tone that suggests that the Golden Sweet Potato Festival doesn’t have quite the same pull as the main stage at Coachella. Sorry Mrs Musgraves.
It may have been a small town upbringing but Musgraves remembers her early years fondly. “I had a very quote-unquote ‘normal’ childhood,” she says. “We were lower middle class. My parents were small business owners and they’re still together. I have one sister, Kelly. I spent a lot of time outside. I begged my parents for a horse but I never got one. It wasn’t a super luxurious upbringing by any means, but it was happy.”
Fans of childhood dreams coming true will be pleased to know she has now finally got her horse. Meanwhile, Musgraves is self-aware enough to know that there were some parts of life that growing up in a small Texan town didn’t teach her about. “No matter where you grow up you’re kind of a product of your environment until you leave that and get a different perspective,” she says when I ask her if she’d consider parts of her upbringing ‘redneck’. “I was definitely more in that category then. I just hadn’t seen the world yet, ever. I hadn’t been around a lot of different kinds of people. I know it sounds stupid but I just hadn’t. I moved to Austin after high school and of course that’s a huge melting pot. My childhood best guy friend came out to me one day, and that made a big impression on me”.
I am keen to get to the interview from Rolling Stone. As Golden Hour is such a magnificent album, I wanted to quote a couple of reviews. This is what AllMusic had to say in their review:
“Golden Hour shimmers with the vivid colors that arrive when the sun starts to set, when familiar scenes achieve a sense of hyperreality. Such heightened emotions are a new aesthetic for Kacey Musgraves, who previously enlivened traditional country with her sly synthesis of old sounds and witty progressive lyrics. Musgraves barely winks on Golden Hour, disguising her newfound emotional candidness behind a gorgeous veneer of harmonies and synthesizers. Sonically, the album doesn't scan country. Whenever Musgraves makes an explicit nod to the past, she acknowledges the smooth grooves of yacht rock and the glitterball pulse of disco, styles that only have a tangential relationship with country but feel more welcome in a landscape where R&B and hip-hop are embraced by some of the biggest stars in country. Musgraves doesn't mine this vein, preferring a soft, blissed-out vibe to skittering rhythms and fleet rhymes. At their core, the songs on Golden Hour -- which Musgraves largely co-wrote with her co-producers Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, but also featuring Natalie Hemby, Luke Laird, and Shane McAnally, among other collaborators -- don't play with form: they are classic country constructions, simply given productions that ignore country conventions from either the present or the past. This is a fearless move, but Golden Hour is hardly confrontational. It's quietly confident, unfurling at its own leisurely gait, swaying between casual confessions and songs about faded love. The very sound of Golden Hour is seductive -- it's warm and enveloping, pitched halfway between heartbreak and healing -- but the album lingers in the mind because the songs are so sharp, buttressed by long, loping melodies and Musgraves' affectless soul-baring. Previously, her cleverness was her strong suit, but on Golden Hour she benefits from being direct, especially since this frankness anchors an album that sounds sweetly blissful, turning this record into the best kind of comfort: it soothes but is also a source of sustenance”.
The second review that I want to bring in is from The Guardian. It is wonderful to see the support and praise Golden Hour received:
“Musgraves’ 2015 follow-up, Pageant Material, was more consolidation than progression, but Golden Hour is something else entirely: an album built for crossover success. The lyrics dial down her trademark sardonic vignettes of small-town life in favour of more universal themes. She’s very good at knowingly playing with country cliches while writing about love: “I wanna show you off every evening,” she sings on Velvet Elvis, “go out with you in powder blue and tease my hair up high.” The music, meanwhile, draws not just on classic rock – it’s not a stretch to imagine Rainbow as a cut from an early 70s Elton John album, while the title track carries a distinct hint of Comes a Time-era Neil Young – but also on hazy psychedelia and Daft Punk-influenced disco-house.
The former works to impressive effect on the drowsy, vocoder-assisted Oh What a World, while the latter represents a very bold move, not least because attempts to meld country with dancefloor beats have frequently yielded some of the least disarming music in history, from Rednex’s Cotton Eye Joe to the terrifying ordeal that is Billie Jo Spears’ assault on I Will Survive. But High Horse works with a casual elan: the song is beautifully turned, nothing about its sound feels ungainly or cobbled together and there’s a lovely up-yours quality to its vocal hook, which any Top 40 pop artist would feel impelled to slather in Auto-Tune, but Musgraves sings straight.
The success of High Horse is indicative of the ease and confidence that courses through Golden Hour. Regardless of genre, you’ll be hard pushed to find a better collection of pop songs this year. Everything clicks perfectly, but the writing has an effortless air; it never sounds as if it’s trying too hard to make a commercial impact, it never cloys, and the influences never swallow the character of the artist who made it. In recent years, there have been plenty of artists who’ve clumsily tried to graft the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on to their own. On Lonely Weekend, possibly the best track here, Musgraves succeeds in capturing some of that album’s dreamy atmosphere without giving the impression that she’s striving to sound like Fleetwood Mac. It’s an album that imagines a world in which its author is the mainstream, rather than an influential outlier. It says something about its quality that, by the time it’s finished, that doesn’t seem a fanciful notion at all”.
I am going to bring this to 2021. It has been two years since Golden Hour and there is talk of a fifth studio album. I am really excited to see what Musgraves delivers next. She is a sensational artist and one that will inspire artists years from now. I am not going to drop in everything from the Rolling Stone interview. That said, there is quite a lot that caught my eye:
“It’s exactly one week after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and her nerves having been frayed like a rodeo rope, Kacey Musgraves is today opting for some self-care. This is how she finds herself, raven tendrils piled carelessly atop her head, pale cheeks slightly flushed, in a floral and fetching Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit and up to her armpits in steaming hot water in a private session at Nashville’s Holiday Salon & Bathhouse (“Sweat Out Your Sins,” its bumper sticker beckons, with a cheekiness that could easily find a home in a Musgraves lyric). “I just felt like starting the day off on some kind of therapeutic note,” she explains, as if — that week of all weeks — an explanation were necessary.
What happened at age nine or 10 was this: Musgraves started performing. And what was happening when she signed on for the guided trip was this: the emotional fallout from her divorce from musician Ruston Kelly, for the love of whom she had written Golden Hour. Whether those two things, the performing and the breakup, are related, who’s to say? Certainly not Musgraves, who vaguely explains that her marriage “just simply didn’t work out. It’s nothing more than that. It’s two people who love each other so much, but for so many reasons, it just didn’t work. I mean, seasons change. Our season changed.”
But there are other things she says that day that are perhaps more illuminating. For instance: “Part of me questions marriage as a whole, in general. I mean, I was open to it when it came into my life. I embraced it. I just have to tell myself I was brave to follow through on those feelings. But look at Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. They’re doing something right.” And: “I think I live best by myself. I think it’s OK to realize that.” And: “I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on growing up as a woman in the South and being a performer from a young age — we were told to please, to make this person happy. That has to imprint on your code. It kind of erodes boundaries. So I’m trying to examine things that may not be useful anymore and maybe unlearn some things.”
usgraves was an achiever, but not, by nature, a pleaser, which makes for an interesting combo in the Venn diagram of personality. In school, she did well enough in classes that interested her, but shamelessly blew off those that didn’t. She managed to get in trouble “just for dumb shit. I would talk back a lot or be late, just classroom disruption, always had to have the last word. I would cheat on papers. I would sneak out, get grounded. There was nothing to do in Golden, it wasn’t even worth sneaking out for.”
After high school, she moved to Austin, and then to Nashville’s east side, living in a downtrodden house below an old woman everyone called Mama Sophia, with whom she would kindly share her weed. She wrangled work as a demo-tape singer after quitting a job performing at kids’ birthdays when, she says, the kid in question turned out to be Blake Shelton. “Actually, I found out later it was Blake Shelton,” she qualifies. “But the guy was like, ‘Yeah, there’s a birthday party at the Palm restaurant and it’s a famous person, and they need a French maid to deliver balloons and sit on the birthday boy’s lap.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, no. I’m not doing that.’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Ana Cuba for FADER
She also turned down the first record deal she was offered. By then, she’d gotten a staff position as a songwriter, and had realized that “there’s a lot to being an artist that’s pretty daunting. And you only get your first shot to say something to the world once, so it better be what you want to say.” A year or so later, however, she’d figured out what that was, having rounded up a cache of songs she didn’t want to give away to other artists. A few years after that, she was covering “No Scrubs” in London’s Royal Albert Hall, and a few years after that, she was being heralded as “the world’s preeminent country-pop starlet who can fuck up a banjo lick real good and simultaneously know who Trixie Mattel is.”
Her rise might have felt like a “Slow Burn,” as per her song with that title, but looking back she realizes that it all happened in a blur of momentum. In the unexpected months of reflection the pandemic has provided, Musgraves has been working to unblur things: the divorce, yes, but also the years of living on the road “like camping at full speed,” the decades of eroded boundaries. “I’m someone who deals with anxiety by making sure I stay busy and moving,” she says. “And I haven’t had that luxury this year. So I’ve been forced to sit with my sadness, sit with my anxiety, sit with my anger, sit with all the things that you normally can outrun.” She pauses to consider. “I think that’s kind of a beautiful thing.”
That expansive perspective sure comes in handy in the parking lot. Towel-dryed and wearing high-cut jeans and a fuzzy sort of jacket, she’s behind the wheel of her Audi and apologizing for the tumbleweed of hair left behind by her dog, Pepper, when — “Shitballs!” — she backs right into the bumper of a nearby Honda SUV. She looks at me wide-eyed, mouth in a capital “O,” the blissed-out glow of the spa eroding in nanoseconds. A scrape runs along the Honda’s bumper, one that can’t be buffed out by a spare Covid mask, try as Musgraves might. “Shit, what do I do?” she asks before sticking a note under the Honda’s wiper with a fake name, her phone number, and the promise to “make it right.” Only then does she check her own bumper, which is scraped in a similar fashion. This seems to concern her much less. “Jeez, I don’t deserve nice things,” she says wryly before gingerly pulling into the traffic circulating through Nashville’s low-slung environs.
On the way to producer Daniel Tashian’s house to work on her new album, which is set to be released this year, she explains how two days ago she was in the process of sitting with her sadness, listening to Bach’s “Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh,” when suddenly the word “tragedy” sprung to mind. This got her thinking about Greek tragedies and the classic three-act narrative, which got her thinking about her divorce and also about the state of America and also about the state of the world at large, locked down and fearful. “This last chapter of my life and this whole last year and chapter for our country — at its most simple form, it’s a tragedy,” she figured. “And then I started looking into why portraying a tragedy is actually therapeutic and why it is a form of art that has lasted for centuries. It’s because you set the scene, the audience rises to the climax of the problem with you, and then there’s resolve. There’s a feeling of resolution at the end. I was inspired by that.”
Soon she was thinking of Romeo and Juliet and the idea of being “star-crossed,” and the revelation that, of the 39 songs she’d thus far written over the course of the past few years, she could figure out which ones to use if she structured the album like a tragedy, grouping the songs into acts. Suddenly, the album that had seemed fairly nebulous began to take real shape in her mind. “It’s crazy because you have to just wait on it,” she says of that moment. “You can’t ask for it.” The conceptualization also showed her that she still needed one more song, the one that would be the “crescendo of the climax. And that’s what we’re going to play around with today,” she says, rolling the car to a stop in front of a white, brick house.
She finds Tashian and fellow producer Ian Fitchuk — the team also behind Golden Hour — in the backyard, sitting around a fire pit, near a trampoline and a plastic slide and a couple of large storage pods, out of which Tashian’s wife sells vintage books. In front of the garage, which has been converted to a studio referred to as Royal Plum, there is a tangle of pastel bikes. Placidly moving about all this is a yellow dog named Pippi.
“I just want to continue to make healthy choices for myself physically, mentally,” she says, perched on the yellow duvet. “Even when the world starts ramping up again, I want to keep the things I’ve found useful this past year.” This means riding her horse more “because that’s what makes my soul really happy,” doing more pottery, doing more journaling, especially while listening to the Johns Hopkins playlist, which is meant to evoke moments from her trip. It means trying to be OK with the fact that catharsis “is a moving target,” and that “doing the right thing just doesn’t feel right sometimes.” It means recognizing the golden hour never lasts, and that it’s always inevitably followed by night. “I’m in a night period,” Musgraves had said. “But what’s great about that is that next is another light period. It will come again.”
Musgraves doesn’t even know if she’ll tour this next album. The season when she wants to say what it will end up saying might pass, and she’s OK with that. The important thing is that she’ll have said it. “I mean, it’s a therapeutic outlet for me, you know? I can’t help but to write about what I’m going through. I want to honor the huge range of emotion that I’ve felt over this past year, past six months. I also want to honor the relationship we had and the love we have for each other. Because it’s very real.”
Next week she’ll get in the studio with Fitchuk and Tashian and keep figuring out how to do that, how to record the story of her unfolding tragedy in a way that might bring about resolution. She’ll surround herself with salt lamps and good energy and maybe some fat joints, and certainly with musicians who feel “almost like my brothers at this point.” The songs are all there, in her brain and her Voice Memos app, ready to be actualized. Just in the past day, she’d gotten the idea to have Carlos Santana play on “Star-Crossed,” and heard that he may very well be game. So much was possible. There were many paths to healing. Oh, and one more thing: The owner of the Honda had called to report that the scrape was no big deal. She doesn’t even like that car anyway”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Cass Bird for Elle
Before rounding up, Musgraves conducted an interview with Elle last week week. We learned more about her upcoming album.
“And with her upcoming music, her canny ability to connect with her listeners should only intensify. Troye Sivan, who worked with her on a remix of his song “Easy” last year, puts it best: “It feels like you have a friend when you’re listening to a Kacey Musgraves song.”
It isn’t quite right to say that her new album is the inverse of Golden Hour, which was written while she was falling in love with Kelly—the looming negative image behind those warm snapshots. When I went back and re-listened to Golden Hour, I was struck by the pathos lurking in the wings of even the most chipper songs, like a restless houseguest. “Lonely Weekend” is about missing someone who’s out of town to the point where you feel unmoored. The title track begs, “Keep me in your glow.” And “Happy & Sad” pretty much explains itself. Musgraves excels at writing about the kind of complicated emotional states that there should be a multisyllabic German word for. And sometimes, she admits, “I just make something more sad than it needs to be.
“Golden Hour was, in a lot of senses, escapism,” she adds. “It was fantasy. It was rose-colored glasses.” Its successor, she says, “is realism.” The album rejects the linearity of the moved-on, never-been-better narrative. Instead, she sings about longing for the past, recognizing that it was imperfect and craving it anyway, thinking about the possibilities of putting oneself out there again, and then politely demurring, for now. And about modern quandaries like scrolling through old pictures on your phone, examining the digital wreckage of an analog entanglement (“It’s that space where you’re like, ‘It’s too soon to delete these, but I also don’t want to look at them’ ”), and timeless ones, like trying to shape-shift into the person a partner wants you to be…
Speaking of the expectations we place on women, Musgraves has spent this time reexamining the ideas she absorbed about marriage growing up. The album finds her wondering what it means to be the right kind of wife. “I come from a family full of long marriages. My grandparents met when they were in second and third grade, and they’re still together in their eighties,” while her parents ran a small business together and sat side by side at their desks for 30 years. When she divorced, “It was hard to not feel like I was in some ways a failure,” Musgraves says, bemoaning the fact that relationships that have ended are described as “failed” or seen as shameful. After all, she says, “There’s nothing more shameful than staying somewhere where you don’t fit anymore”.
I am going to wrap it up here. I think people should check out Kacey Musgraves’ music and follow her (you can follow her on Twitter). She is one of the finest songwriters in the world. In a dark and unpredictable 2021, a new Kacey Musgraves album would…
PROVIDE a ray of sunshine.