It does, especially after the past few years of her life and career. Her Golden Hour follow-up, 2021’s Star-Crossed, was a breakup record of dramatic proportions, accompanied by an ambitious 50-minute film that saw Musgraves as a lonely bride with diamanté eyebrows, strutting around the desert with drag queens. It also prompted heated debate about Musgraves’s position as a country artist, after the Grammys moved her from the country category to the pop category. (Musgraves’s response at the time was to paraphrase a lyric from a song on her debut album: “You can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.”) Yet Musgraves explains that she’s never really felt constrained by genre, and certainly not the notoriously strict parameters set out by country music’s gatekeepers. “If you look at the records I’ve made since day one, they’ve always been a huge patchwork quilt of so many different influences,” she says, breezily. “I don’t think I can even really say 100% what my own music is.”
Was there a eureka moment with any of the songs on Deeper Well, where she struck upon the rootsier sound she wanted to pursue across the rest of the record? “Oh, let me look!” Musgraves says, pulling out her phone and opening her Notes app. “I keep a running list of all the songs I’ve finished,” she explains. “Oh my gosh, there’s currently 114 on here…” She wrote 114 songs for the record? “Yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes it takes a while to get there.” Musgraves struggles to pick out a specific track that served as her entry point, instead ascribing it to an overall feeling. “It’s just where I’m at in my life,” she shrugs. “I feel more grounded than ever, and like my feet are really planted in the soil, so I can be more vulnerable. It’s messy, being a human. But it’s also fucking beautiful. I wanted to appreciate that beauty, and the ugliness too, the messiness, the flaws in myself, learning how to be better—all of that.”
What’s most striking about Deeper Well is Musgraves’s ability to take a grab bag of ingredients and references, and fold them effortlessly into the album’s (organic, wholegrain) dough so that the overall texture runs smooth. “Jade Green” might spin a Stevie Nicks-esque yarn of a talismanic jade bracelet over jangling guitars, but it’s immediately followed by the classic, stripped-back folk of “The Architect,” in which Musgraves—accompanied by a waltzing acoustic guitar—questions the presence of a higher power. “I wanted to reduce the palette with this record,” she says, likening the experience of listening to it to walking through nature “and occasionally stumbling upon some modern art sculptures along the way.” One such form might be the album highlight, “Lonely Millionaire”—a keyboard-led soft rock riff on Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”—which features some of Deeper Well’s most forthright (and self-aware) lyrics about being distracted by the shiny trappings of fame. “There were definitely some examples that I’ve seen of that in the industry,” she says of what inspired it. “But I saw a quote the other day that said something like, ‘The ultimate wealth is being in tune with the flow of nature.’ The ultimate wealth is already in you, you know what I mean? It’s not an outside thing.”
