Deeper Well

Deeper Well is a revelation – as though Musgraves stumbled on an oasis after months in the desert.

There aren’t any real misses on Deeper Well, and the record feels more like a dreamy mood piece or conversation with a friend than an attempt to round up a collection of chart-ready singles or social media-friendly soundbytes. Musgraves was far more interested in asking the bigger questions — and it doesn’t even seem to matter too much which answers she found. The deep dive was the point.

Nearly every one of the 16 tracks begins with delicate finger-picking, and then stays there, flying proudly in the face of “there needs to be a banger” convention and staying committed to the acoustic bit. It’s uncompromising in that way, and all the lovelier for its confidence that you’ll turn up the volume, so she doesn’t have to.

Musgraves’ most sonically cohesive album to date, every song pulling from the same muted, pastel palette. And yet, there is still enough variation to keep things interesting from song to song.

While Deeper Well can be listened to as a companion to Golden Hour, Kacey Musgraves isn’t necessarily trying to recreate its magic formula. Instead, the singer has grown significantly as a musician and lyricist over the last six years.

Deeper Well is an album to wallow in, one for those rainy days inside where you just want to sit and find comfort in music. For anybody undergoing some large life changes, this is an album that will be able to gently guide you through those times.

While it certainly has a few weaker tracks, the core of the record is truly breathtaking to behold. It’s a moment of self-discovery and commitment to growth that eschews the lavish tendencies of Star-Crossed for something more personal, honest, and vulnerable.

“Deeper Well” is committed to understatement. It rarely flaunts its 21st-century sonic resources, and when it does, it stays humble about them. .... But the track’s [“Sway”] last 30 seconds flaunt technology with multiple a cappella Musgraves vocals: low, high, reverberating, sustained, wordless or intoning “I’ll sway.” It sounds reverent and meditative, computerized yet still human, revealing — only by contrast — how carefully restrained the album is.

A sparkling set recalling the mid-century tipping point of folk revivalism into rock. [Apr 2024, p.38]

There’s an altogether calmer atmosphere on display here, that in its beauty forgoes some of the immediacy that characterised her earlier catalogue’s stand-out moments.

Like the open-ended, amorphous production, the tunes all accentuate the record's general thrust of interior contentment. Musgraves, along with her regular collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, do manage to capture and sustain this delicate sensibility, creating a record that's every bit as pretty and memorable as gentle afternoon rain.

Despite the occasional lack of captivating subject matter, it signifies a grown woman embracing new beginnings. The grim clouds are already clearing towards the finale – a million little stars bursting, fluttering, ready for more grandeur.

But if the album’s unwaveringly restrained instrumentation holds it back from ranking alongside Musgraves’s best work, it’s still a welcome shift away from the country pop of 2018’s Golden Hour.

Deeper Well is sympathetically fame-agnostic and focused on steadying Musgraves’ axis, but its emollient balms also aren’t particularly satisfying when you know what she’s capable of.

Her well of inspiration has always been deep, with songs about environmentalism, family troubles and small town gossip, but it seems now, when pressed too hard on the idea of maturity, Musgraves appears all too shallow, and no longer the three-dimensional character we loved and craved so much.

Songs such as Jade Green are so focused on the minutiae of her life as to feel tedious. She finds a delicate balance between the two, though, on Anime Eyes, a dizzying, almost comically lovestruck track that finds Musgraves eschewing the tasteful zen of the rest of the album in favour of all-out lyrical maximalism. It’s a flavour Deeper Well could have used more of.

Musgraves’ assertiveness feels like a real glimmer of light amid the sparse compositions that run through this thoughtful, imperfect, down-to-earth record.

It’s rare to hear an album that scales such songwriting peaks with the spectacular one-two of Cardinal and Deeper Well before flopping back into total blah-ness. This album proves the line between sublime simplicity and vacant banality can be surprisingly thin.