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Kacey Musgraves: Deeper Well review – folk-pop that’s high on life and pure as mountain air

The crossover star’s sixth album opens with a spectacular one-two of the most beautiful songs you’ll hear all year – but the loved-up mood and back-to-nature wonder becomes twee

“Everything I did seemed better when I was high, I don’t know why.” The 35-year-old’s erstwhile weed habit won’t come as a huge surprise to fans: she claimed her 2018 album Golden Hour was partly written under the influence of LSD, while its follow-up Star-Crossed took shape after a guided psilocybin mushroom trip. Star-Crossed, inspired by her subsequent divorce, was a restrained and, for some, anticlimactic sequel, yet it cemented her standing as a mainstream artist able to thrive outside her original country context while retaining the genre’s sonic markers – a trajectory not dissimilar to pop overlord Taylor Swift’s. On Deeper Well, she seems newly unburdened – by expectations of a post-Golden Hour blockbuster; by country music limitations; by reliving her breakup – and is now luxuriating in healing, back-to-nature goodness, gilded with a distinctly millennial air of self-care (there are references to Saturn returns and jade crystals).

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