Kacey Musgraves “Deeper Well” review: a wellness lifestyle album that isn’t Goop-core

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Feel free to cringe a little to hear that Kacey Musgraves is now singing about the holistic benefits of moon baths and jade bracelets, but know that unlike other recent pop albums that dabble in wellness, “Solar Power” by Lorde, FKA twigs “caprisongs” – the singer’s new album, “Deeper Well”, gets away with it. Because? Because Musgraves is a country star who ultimately believes in Willie Nelson more than astrology, tarot, or Goop. He knows that the best country songs ever written aim to provide clear answers to existence’s thorniest questions. Luckily for those of us who think of wellness lifestyles as a spiritual fantasy for people with money, those are still the kind of songs Musgraves wants to write.

The job demands honesty, and throughout “Deeper Well,” it requires Musgraves to accept everything she has learned from her astrologer and her therapist (who we hope are not the same person). “My Saturn has returned,” she announces at the beginning of the album. main track, explaining how, eight years after turning 27, he slowly untangled himself from everyone in his orbit who exuded “dark energy.” However, the starry, self-care language isn’t too distracting. This is a luxurious, liquid breakup ballad about resilience and closure, and Musgraves sings it with a beautiful flatness that she has made her signature, as if transposing the physical landscape of her native Texas into sound.

In “Dinner with friends”, he promises his love for his home state with an asterisk, praising “the sky there, and the horses and the dogs, but none of their laws”, and then moves on to something even bigger with “The architect”, wondering how God designed the Honeycrisp in the palm of his hand. “Even something as small as an apple is simple and somehow complex,” he sings. “Sweet and divine, the perfect design. Can I speak to the architect? As an acoustic guitar and piano play their quiet waltz in the background, Musgraves gently modifies the song’s last line to send us all into the void: “Is Is there an architect?

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The production choices on “Deeper Well” also sound clever and thoughtful, even when they seem extremely literal. “Cardinal” – a beautiful, resonant, vaguely psychedelic song about an omen bird delivering “a message from the other side” – feels like it was produced to jingle like the Byrds. On “Deeper Well,” the notes that follow the chorus are treated to a reverb designed to evoke coins thrown into a trough. But more than anything, be careful with the battery. They are propulsive and rich, like beanbags falling on corn boards (“Cardinal”), or like open hands hitting the tables (“Influence“), or like ping-pong balls bouncing inside an empty cardboard box (the moonbathing song, “green jade“). Sonically, the message of this album is about the need to move forward, evolve and progress. What fundamentally redeems Musgraves in her feel-good phase is that he is going through it.

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