Copyright theage
When it comes to Australia, country superstar Kacey Musgraves is overdue for a do-over. Her last trip here was a literal washout, with wild weather and flooding cancelling what was to be her headline slot at Splendour in the Grass in July 2022. “That nearly broke me,” Musgraves recalls. “We made it all the way over and then we literally were there not even 24 hours before I had to turn around and come right back home. It was like 30 hours of travel in a period of 48 hours. I think it might have changed me forever.” Coming from Musgraves, country music’s ultimate earth child, that’s probably not hyperbole. You get the sense that something as unnatural as a flight (let alone a 30-hour round-trip) must be existential torture for Musgraves. Speaking from her woodsy home in Nashville – dressed in a blue denim shirt and hoop earrings, her blue heeler Pepper by her side – she rushes through answers as though she’d like nothing more than to blitz through her promo obligations and get back to touching grass, or at least her horses. The wonder of the natural world never seems far from Musgraves’ mind. Before our interview, she’d been out buying goldfish for her pond out back. “We’ll see how they fare against the raccoons in the area,” she says. For her 37th birthday, just a few days later, she’d planned a camping trip with her small group of friends (“freaks and weirdos”, she calls them). “We’re gonna ride horses and make cowboy breakfast outside on the fire, and take the horses down to the river and just camp out under the stars.” It’s also the focus of Deeper Well, the 2024 album that will make up the bulk of her Australian shows this month. After the acclaimed genre excursions of 2018’s Golden Hour and 2021’s Star-Crossed, Deeper Well found Musgraves in a quieter, contemplative mood. The album was such a sonic and spiritual retreat that it didn’t capture me much until, one day, listening while walking through a rainstorm under the canopies of willow trees in my local park, it suddenly made perfect sense. “Those songs still feel like a home base to me,” says Musgraves of Deeper Well. “One great thing about getting older is you have less tolerance for fake bullshit and it gets easier to simplify and look out for yourself in ways you aren’t capable of doing when you’re younger, and that’s reflected in those songs.
