Since emerging with her excellent major label debut Same Trailer Different Park in 2013, Kacey Musgraves has established herself as one of the most unique singer-songwriters of her generation. After embracing pop during the pandemic with 2021’s Star-Crossed, she returns this month with Deeper Well – a magnificent, stripped-back album that might just be her best yet. Here, the record-breaking star – joined by manager Jason Owen, Interscope Capitol Labels Group CEO & chairman John Janick and team Polydor – catches up with Music Week to talk ghosts, Grammys and following her arrow all the way to the top...
WORDS: GEORGE GARNER PHOTOS: MARTA BEVACQUA
Kacey Musgraves is almost set. In a short while she’ll be on a plane. There’s just something she needs to do first.
“I’m moving slow today,” she says, her rich Texan accent still undiluted despite years of globetrotting. “I need to get my steps in.”
So it is that our interview begins with the seven-time Grammy Award-winning artist hopping onto a treadmill for a brisk walk. It only seems fitting for a star who’s burned such an individual trail over the years.
Musgraves is in her hotel in New York and it’s in this city where much of today’s topic of discussion was recorded: Deeper Well, her magnificent fifth studio album, out March 15 via Interscope/MCA Nashville/Polydor. Between records, she arrived in the Big Apple with no grand designs.
“I was starting to feel the itch to write some songs and see what was out there if I threw my fishing pole in,” she explains. “I wanted to explore the writing process in a different place to Nashville. It’s real as fuck. There’s something to knowing that you’re not alone in your emotions here because if you’re having a really shitty day, there’s no way you can be the saddest person in New York. You could walk 30 seconds down the street and encounter people having a way worse time, or better. There’s a camaraderie in the human experience.”
The strange thing is that those new songs sounded nothing like the city that birthed them. And that is not lost on its creator.
“It’s ironic that softer, more organic flavours came out in one of the biggest cities in the world,” she smiles. “It’s more of my roots.”
Distilling her sound back to its essentials, Deeper Well is not only sure to be one of 2024’s best albums; it may actually be her finest moment yet.
“A critic the other day said to me, ‘This is her Blue,’ and I said, ‘Woah!’” marvels Musgraves’ long-term manager Jason Owen of Sandbox Entertainment from his Nashville office, grinning at the comparison to Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece. “My favourite songs on it have changed dramatically over [the] months and that’s how I was with [2018’s Grammy Album Of The Year-winning] Golden Hour. That’s how I know she’s really nailed it.”
“What she’s achieved with this record, like all her releases really, is a classic singer-songwriter storytelling album,” hails Interscope Capitol Labels Group CEO & chairman John Janick. “Every single track plays an important part. Deeper Well is songwriting at its best.”
Musgraves’ gym attire points to where much of that songwriting took place: a trippy tie-dye T-shirt bearing the Electric Lady Studios logo. It was in the legendary Greenwich Village facility that she spent time writing, recording and exploring Jimi Hendrix’s old apartment. When describing that experience upon Deeper Well’s grand unveiling to the public, she commented, mysteriously: “Great ghosts.”
That Musgraves is cognisant of the spiritual contours of life is hardly a surprise. In 2018, when Music Week joined her in Nashville ahead of Golden Hour’s release, she mentioned how her house was, if not full-blown haunted, then at least “settling”. Years later, after the death of her close friend and country icon John Prine, she spoke of his spirit visiting her and impressing upon her to “walk in peace”. Her friends, she explains, often say to her, “This could only happen to you.” So, were any spectral energies encountered at Electric Lady?
“There were a lot of stories from people about several characters that manifest themselves there,” she says. “There’s a flapper lady straight out of the 1920s who’s been seen a lot. I never saw her, but there’s a textured energy you can feel – it’s not negative. There was nothing on the level of [the John Prine experience]. I’ve had lights turn on and off by themselves. Any time you share an unexplainable experience, you have the chance of people saying, ‘I don’t believe you,’ but I don’t really need anyone to.”
Deeper Well’s incredible opening track Cardinal shares in this spiritual communion.
“After John Prine passed, there was a lot of uptick in activity,” she recalls. “Some really poignant little synchronicities happened. A cardinal would visit every day, perch on a branch outside my window and look at me. It was like, ‘It could be nothing’, but there’s also a lot of mythology around cardinals being spirit messengers from the other side. There’s even a saying, ‘When cardinals appear, angels are near.’ Life would be so boring if it was only the things we can see. I love the idea of there being more that we don’t quite understand.”
This is echoed on The Architect, which sees Musgraves reunite with Nashville songwriting royalty Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne.
“It’s about how much control do we really have here,” she muses. “And is there a blueprint for any of this? What are we supposed to learn from all this immense suffering?”
This is indicative of Deeper Well, a record that often tackles life’s biggest questions. In sound and feel, it’s a world apart from 2021’s Star-Crossed. Not only was that a pop-leaning concept record (split into three acts with an accompanying film!), it was also freighted with lyrics tackling her divorce to fellow country singer Ruston Kelly. Even before its release, Musgraves was calling it a “mindfuck” of an album emotionally.
Jason Owen has managed Musgraves since she was a young staff-songwriter dreaming of becoming an artist. “She had terrible bangs,” he jokes of the person he first encountered. “We always laugh about that to this day. Terrible bangs.” His fondness for – and pride in – Musgraves is palpable today. The only time he’s not smiling is when he recalls the successful, yet gruelling Star-Crossed chapter.
“That was a very, very hard thing,” he recalls. “To everyone’s mind, Star-Crossed was a follow-up to Golden Hour, and it was logistically, but it really wasn’t in my mind. It was a moment in time that she was going through and needed to talk about lyrically. It was like, ‘Let her get through this moment, say what she wants to say, and then step out of it and start on the next record.’”
A move towards lyrical depersonalisation could perhaps have been expected. Instead, Musgaves has gone all-in.
“Kacey is one of the true greats, that rare artist where every album she writes has been a chapter in her life,” hails Janick. “We’re all watching as she’s writing the story.”
“It takes bravery to leave the shallow end in search of deeper meaning,” Musgraves says, pondering the album title. “A lot of people are comfortable in the shallow end, and that’s fine. That’s one way to live. But the older I get, the more I realise how much depth really means to me. If you’re wanting deep relationships with other people, you’ve got to know who you are first. There’s a lot of strength in that vulnerability. This album cuts to the core of the human experience – it’s a journey through intimacy, darkness and light, my connection to myself, love, the fear that love can sometimes bring, nature, friendships, mortality and so many other things.”
And all of this to be explored while she’s on a treadmill…
Kacey Musgraves is currently emerging from her “cottage core” era. She took it very seriously.
“I fucking went in on cosiness last fall and winter,” she laughs. “I was cooking soups every day, going to the farmer’s market, lounging by my fire, cuddling my dog, doing crafts, looking at the deer and turkey outside my door and walking in the woods.”
Pottery, exercise and meditation have been big priorities. If she ever retires she plans on really getting into bonsai trees.
“It’s nice to retreat and live like a real person, collect life experiences, and come back out again and put everything I have into music,” she says. “I would get so burned out if I was in people’s faces 24/7. I would burn myself out. You’ve got to have a break from the ‘brand’ you’re creating. Take a clay class! Ride a horse! Fucking put your feet in some grass!”
It hasn’t always been possible for Musgraves to decouple from the post-Grammy Album Of The Year rocket she’s been strapped to since 2019.
“To be honest, when Golden Hour was breaking, we didn’t have time to really be healthy,” reflects Jason Owen of that period. “She went with it and did awesome with it. She knew this was a rocket ship and that we had to take almost every right opportunity that we could, even though she may have been exhausted.”
Many of the songs on Deeper Well detail the search for wellbeing that came after decompressing from all of this. On Jade Green she opens up about dealing with anxiety, while on Sway she’s in search of new coping mechanisms. Some of the old ways of dealing weren’t cutting it.
Musgraves’ legend was forged early on by her hit single Follow Your Arrow in 2013 – a pro-LGBTQ+ anthem, which enraged country music’s conservative fringes. The same song saw her admit that (gasp!) she likes weed – her home even boasts a framed joint rolled by her friend and collaborator Willie Nelson. Yet on Deeper Well’s title-track, she sings of how hitting ‘the gravity bong’ in the morning isn’t quite getting her by like it used to.
“How do I look after myself? A good therapist helps!” she laughs. “And, honestly, getting better at saying no to things that might leave you drained afterwards going, ‘I didn’t want to go, why did I say fucking yes?’ It’s about being okay with saying no.”
Since the turbulent Star-Crossed campaign, Musgraves and Owen focused on putting the brakes on. Ask her manager what the goals are for Deeper Well and it’s not about first-week sales. It’s about keeping things healthy.
“Kacey taught me the power of saying no more than anyone in my life,” Owen says. “In the past, I tended to say yes more than no. But the balance that we have now? I use that with my other artists, too, thanks to Kacey.”
This becalmed state of mind is also mirrored in Deeper Well’s softer sounds. Musgraves wrote 25 songs for the record, ably assisted by a vintage acoustic that came with a rattlesnake tail shaking around inside, which is said to bring luck.
“I have the guitar with me at the moment,” she says. “It always makes me a little bit nervous to travel with it because it’s from the 1860s!” As such, Deeper Well is a world away from the crossover strains of Star-Crossed or kaleidoscopic experimentalism of Golden Hour. There are no disco stomps like High Horse or bubbling pop gems like Breadwinner. “This record is like walking through the woods and encountering modern art sculptures here and there,” she observes.
It’s all lining up, Kacey is getting so many new listeners
Jason Owen, Sandbox Entertainment
The question is, in a day and age of viral TikTok dance trends, how does this serene, mature record cut through all the noise? Especially when Musgraves has traditionally not always enjoyed much support from country radio in the US. In 2018, she told Music Week about the double standards women encounter in airplay, and how she was unwilling to jump through the hoops expected. “I’ve noticed it first hand for sure, whether it’s being told a certain song won’t work because I’m a female, or a DJ on air asking if he can touch my legs…” she said. Having fielded questions about country radio and gender representation for so many years, it’s impossible to deduce if she’s entirely fed up of the topic...
“Hmm, I can’t tell either,” she laughs, before pondering if things have improved for female acts since then. “It’s hard to say because music is consumed in so many different ways now than just radio.”
Traditionally, the way around such obstacles has been to just let Kacey be Kacey. Predicated on pure talent and atomic charisma, she’s gone viral many times without even trying. The image of her face, contorted in disbelief upon hearing Golden Hour revealed as the Grammy Album Of The Year broke the internet – so much so, she even sold a novelty phone accessory depicting the moment. Product name: ‘Kacey Memegraves.’
But there have been some other strategies put in place to set the stage for Deeper Well. Jason Owen reveals that the record was originally intended to be released in October 2023, with the two agreeing that the timing didn’t feel right.
“When we pushed Deeper Well back, I said to her, ‘Let’s bridge the gap with some of these collaborators that have been reaching out non-stop,’” recalls Owen.
So it was that, rather than playing it low key before making a surprise return, Musgraves recorded collaborations with Zach Bryan (I Remember Everything), Noah Kahan (She Calls Me Back), Madi Diaz (Don’t Do Me Good) and even a cover of Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Three Little Birds for the One Love film. The result? Released in 2023, I Remember Everything scored half a billion streams, became her first No.1 on the US Hot 100 chart and won the pair a Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. In doing so, Musgraves became the only artist in history to receive a Grammy for Best Country Album, Best Country Song, Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Duo/Group Performance. Noah Kahan, meanwhile, one of the hottest new stars in the world, is busy telling millions of his fans that she is “the coolest person ever”.
So, was this wave of pre-release, hyper-successful collaborations a bit of genius, or a stroke of luck?
“Genius! I’m a genius!” laughs Jason Owen, with a self-deprecating wink. “A little bit of both. Everything really lined up. Her monthly listeners have grown exponentially; she is getting so many new listeners.”
This speaks to how Musgraves has thrived over the years, without having to cater to the prevailing algorithms. “Kacey’s a singular artist,” adds John Janick. “She’s one of the best songwriters in music and inspires lots of other artists.” He has a point. Not only has she made fans of Harry Styles and Katy Perry – who have taken her on tour – but also their fans.
“She has stealthily built a fanbase in the UK through proper old-fashioned word of mouth and we finished the last album campaign with an amazing, packed slot on the Other Stage at Glastonbury, which illustrates the growth,” says Stephen Hallowes, co-MD of Musgraves’ UK label Polydor. “Her audience is younger than you’d imagine. More than 70% of her streaming audience is under the age of 34. The audience she attracted since Golden Hour was slightly older, but she’s just recently had a big hit song with Zach Bryan, which was Top 20 in the UK and has brought on a much younger audience.”
Kacey Musgraves is now one of the biggest streaming country artists in the world, sitting on 25 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone. This is not by chance. The creator of Follow Your Arrow has been practising what she preaches right from the very beginning…
Early on in her career, an executive once told Kacey Musgraves not to pick Merry Go ’Round as her debut single because it was too sad. “Sometimes you have to do things you’re not proud of,” she was told. Naturally, she ignored this advice. It went on to go double platinum and win a Grammy for Best Country Song. For all the accolades she’s been showered with, perhaps still not enough credit is given to the bold way Musgraves has always taken control of her career. For one, Star-Crossed and Deeper Well have steered clear of the Grammy-winning Golden Hour’s template. They appear to be the work of an artist who didn’t ask herself if lightning strikes twice, but rather questioned if it actually should…
“Haha!” she blurts out at this suggestion. “I mean, you have no control over what is going to really hit. There’s so many factors. All you have control of is making something that you’re really proud of. I would personally much rather someone not love a project as much as my last, but respect me for authentically putting out what inspired me.”
While charting higher than Golden Hour in the States, Star-Crossed received no Album Of The Year nomination and was, controversially, deemed ineligible for Best Country Album at the Grammys. She shrugged it off at the time.
“I’m from East Texas, there’s always going to be a thread of that through my music,” is her debrief today. “I don’t think I could shake it, even if I wanted to.”
It makes you wonder, though, if living up to Golden Hour ever felt like a burden?
“After winning something like Album Of The Year, it can go one of two ways,” she begins. “It can go a route of pressure, where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I have to achieve that again.’ Or you turn inward and say, ‘I won Album Of The Year because I did nothing but follow my purest intention.’ That’s not to say I don’t have moments of second guessing, but that’s the route I chose. People can come to expect a certain sound from you. Personally, I love keeping them guessing. I also think it’s normal for a career to ebb and flow. Some of the best careers over time have had beautiful ebbs and flows. Not in quality, in visibility. It’s not super-normal to stay on top all of the time.”
There are so many ways in which Musgraves has carefully, quietly defied expectation. Despite presumably having every producer and songwriter in the world wanting to work with her after Golden Hour, she keeps her inner songwriting sanctum small. Deeper Well is co-produced by Musgraves and her long-standing collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk. “I believe if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” she says. Likewise, from Golden Hour onwards, Kacey has stepped back somewhat from the witty, lancing one-liners that initially helped make her name.
“At some point along the way, I just took a big look at my songwriting and thought, ‘Okay, I’ve turned a phrase, I’ve used humour,’” she reflects. “I was worried it could start getting a little ‘bumper sticker-y’ and so I tried to flex a different muscle, which is more from the heart.”
On that topic, Deeper Well shows Musgraves committed to speaking her truth, even when many country artists in particular have been burned for doing so in the past. Dinner With Friends sees her sing in adoration of her birthplace. Albeit with a caveat. ‘My home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs,’ she praises. ‘But none of their laws’. Coming after the repeal of Roe Vs Wade and legislation affecting the LGBTQ+ community, it seems a powerful show of solidarity?
“I believe we’re on the same page there,” she says. “I can have massive amounts of Texan pride and also not agree with everything they impose. It’s a scary time for a lot of people.”
Credit: Getty Images
When talk turns to the music industry, Musgraves understands why, financially, labels so often play it safe with the acts they sign. But...
“It’s a flawed formula,” she says. “You can’t just have carbon copies of the same thing. You have to offer different perspectives and sounds. All the greats that we now herald as icons were once disruptors that were given a chance. It’s important to have really bold, fearless, courageous people on the business side that are willing to take risks on things.”
Musgraves found that in her manager Jason Owen.
“The stars aligned when I met Jason,” she says. “I consider him a great friend and confidant. And we challenge each other. We may not always agree on the same thing, but mostly we do. In the rare times that we don’t, we really talk about it. Ultimately, he really, really respects me as a creative and he fights so hard for my vision. I could literally text him at 2am saying, ‘What if we did this!?’ and pitch something wild. I know at 8am I’ll get a text from him saying, ‘I’m on it!’”
“I had three of those texts this morning!” Owen corroborates, a few days later. “One of the craziest was two nights after she won Album Of The Year,” he says. “She sent me one of those 2am texts and said, ‘I really want to do an old-school Judy Garland-esque Christmas special.’ And so the next day I was setting up some meetings with Netflix, Amazon and more. We ended up selling it to Amazon!”
One of the biggest things that’s been preoccupying the artist/manager duo right now are ignitable wicks embedded in wax. Deeper Well is not just an album, folks, it’s a candle.
“You’ll never see her doing a Diet Coke campaign or anything like that, that’s just not who she is,” he says. “But she really wanted to do a candle on Golden Hour, and obviously [the song] Slow Burn made a lot of sense. That candle did crazy business. I would anticipate that she does a new candle every album now [laughs].”
It’s not so much a case of ‘makes dollars, makes sense’ but more ‘makes scents, makes dollars’. And nor is it just Musgraves’ candles that are scented – so, too, are the actual vinyl inner sleeves of Deeper Well.
“Isn’t that cool?” she grins. “When I found out that was a possibility, it was a no brainer. I turned Deeper Well into a scent and those records will have scented sleeves. Scent is so tied to memory and so it’s always interesting to think about creating an experience for someone who’s listening. Remember scratch-and-sniff stickers when you were a kid? I always loved those.”
Universal have spoken a lot about helping their artists reach superfans lately. The Deeper Well campaign is a prime example.
“It’s another beautiful collection of vinyl,” says Naomi Williams, senior marketing manager at Polydor, who highlights the Red Cardinal and quilted picture disc variants. “There’s a Deeper Well ’zine, too, that offers fans exclusive liner notes and behind-the-song commentary from Kacey and her collaborators.”
Deeper Well is a classic singer-songwriter album
John Janick, Interscope
Polydor are keeping the campaign very Kacey. Williams says even the outdoor ads have chimed with the pastoral artwork by being placed “in key locations surrounded by greenery”. With Williams pointing to everything from UK/EU dates, magazine covers, promo at BBC Radio 2 and 4 and more, the hopes for the album are high.
“Every Kacey Musgraves album has been important, but I think this has the potential to be her biggest and most important body of work,” says John Janick. “She’s going to continue to sell out arenas all over the world and grow her fanbase in amazing ways.”
“I have two proudest moments,” Owen says looking back on his journey with Musgraves so far. “The [2019] Grammy night certainly is one that I’ll never forget. But the one I remember most was when she played the Royal Albert Hall in 2015. I was with her grandparents and parents in one of the boxes. I got really emotional and when I turned around, they were all crying. There’s just something about being in that room and seeing her on that stage. I can almost cry thinking about it now. Honestly, I was more proud of that than even the Grammy thing.”
This ties into another aspect of Musgraves’ legacy that deserves real celebration. To paraphrase JFK: she asked not what country music could do for her, but rather what she could do for country music. That it is currently the UK’s fastest growing genre has a lot to do with her.
“Before Kacey, [modern] country music hadn’t been as global,” says Owen. “As a team – and I certainly couldn’t do it without numerous people – we really focused on making her a global artist. She put the time and effort into it and it’s a very important part of her. She is the gold standard.”
It hits home for Owen, who remembers that back in the early days, a life of playing smaller theatres constituted her dreams. Unsurprisingly, then, as Musgraves gets her final steps in on the treadmill, she is feeling grateful. She’s done the deep diving to set this next chapter up; now she gets to reap the rewards.
“I’ve already achieved far more than I ever thought possible,” she concludes. “Fame and money have never been my driving factor, ask anyone that works with me. My inspiration and my joy comes from the small things, the real things. That’s what matters on your deathbed. The Grammys are great… Believe me, I’m very thankful for them. But what are people going to say about your character when you leave? That’s what really matters. All the other stuff is just beautiful sparkle.”
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