Kacey Musgraves: The Feminine Spirit

Kacey Musgraves has long complicated the definition of country music. These days, she’s also leaning hard into softness, love (“one of the most radically feminist things you can do”), and not living life in the shallow end. Is this what dreams are made of?

Words by Christina Lee | Photos by Kelly Christine Sutton

Eight days before she leaves her home base of Nashville to tour Europe and the United Kingdom, Kacey Musgraves has 13 onstage looks to get fitted. This endeavor would sound glamorous if it were being described by someone besides Kacey Musgraves.

On one hand, yes, she can appreciate the handiwork involved. Over this Zoom call one Saturday morning in April, she acknowledges that clothing can be its own “fun, creative expression.” 

“But I also get sensory overload sometimes, literally just trying on so many clothes. My skin is like, stop touching me. But it’ll be great. …” 

I laugh, because while her camera is off, I swear I can hear her smile as she rattles off the rest of her to-do list: “Getting my workouts in, and packing. Doing, I guess, clerical work.” If I’ve interpreted her correctly, she downplays what’s in store by riffing off this internet joke about what girls mean when they say they’re running errands. “Like, I have to run errands. What are errands? Nails.”

(Upon hearing that she’d won Album of the Year at the 2018 Grammys, Kacey clutched her purse and mouthed “What?” several times in astonishment. She was then savvy enough to turn her Grammy shock into an internet challenge: “Let the memes begin,” she tweeted.)

On this day, just five weeks after the release of her new album, Deeper Well, Kacey makes tour preparation relatable to someone who’s never toured the world as extensively, let alone for music that continues to captivate even those listeners who say they don’t otherwise listen to country music. 

Deeper Well topped six Billboard charts upon its release, amounting to Kacey’s biggest U.S. sales week yet. This comes nearly a decade after she sang about her momma crying over how she isn’t pageant material (“I’m always higher than my hair … ”). She has pushed back against this notion that she is Wonder Woman (“Don’t you know I’m only human … ”). She’s been downbeat when she was advised to be upbeat. And as the country music industry continues to ask itself what qualifies as country music these days, Kacey won two Grammys the same night for the album Golden Hour, where she sings, “Oh, I bet you think you’re John Wayne / showing up, shooting down everybody” to a disco bassline. 

Country music can have a “very purist mindset,” she says. Artists who blur genre lines get called traitors: “You’re leaving country music!”

“It’s like, no no no. Some of the best creatives create their own genre. They don’t exist just fully in one.” 

Harlan Howard, the late songwriter to artists including Ray Charles and Patsy Cline, once said, “Country music is three chords and a truth.” How exactly do those chords sound? Kacey is among the artists who have complicated the answer. She has also challenged society’s expectations of womanhood. As intimidated as I am to ask her what being a woman means to her right now, Kacey herself barely misses a beat. Perhaps navigating the music industry has reinforced what she’s known all along to be her greatest strength. 

“Being a woman right now means not being afraid of your femininity,” she says. “To me that’s one of the most radically feminist things you can do is to love hard and lean into that softness and not be ashamed of it and not try to change it for anyone who might have a problem with it, you know?”

Partway through our conversation, when making an entirely different point that we’ll get to later, Kacey gets distracted: “I’m literally staring at a big old cardinal right now,” she tells me. “It’s on this beautiful little honeysuckle branch. But anyways. … ”

Deeper Well opens with “Cardinal,” a tribute to one of Kacey’s biggest songwriting inspirations, who regarded redbirds as signs of divine intervention. Kacey first heard John Prine’s music upon moving to Nashville from Texas around 2007, a necessary next step to further her career as a country singer-songwriter.

“I heard it coming out of a radio on a front porch, and I was like, who is that? …  It sounded current to me, even though it was recorded in the ’70s.” Most likely, by her recollection, that song was “Illegal Smile.”  

The two struck up a friendship that seemed unlikely at first, though, of course, it began with another song. Once, after a Christmas fundraiser in Nashville, Kacey and a friend approached Prine and asked whether they could get him high in the parking lot. Prine declined, only to discover that Kacey dropped off a song of hers — one of the first she recorded after  moving to Nashville  — at his label Old Boy Records. It was “Burn One With John Prine.”

Prine never intended “Illegal Smile” to be a weed-smoking anthem, let alone some standing invitation to puff, puff, pass a joint his way. But in “Burn One With John Prine,” Kacey winks at the song’s legacy as she weighs all the reasons why she can’t fit in and behave as she’s “supposed” to. It’s the first time in a song (though crucially not the only time) that she’d remember how “Grandma cried when I pierced my nose.” 

Eight years later, in 2015, Kacey released a song that cast a wary eye toward the very country music industry where she was making inroads. It’s about how as an artist, she wanted to be judged based on her merits and not for scratching someone else’s back. The lyric about being “another gear in the big machine / don’t sound like fun to me” was in part a reference to Taylor Swift’s former label, though the hyperfixation on that fact distracted from the larger point Kacey was making: The song, after all, was called “Good Ol’ Boys Club.”

Kacey’s refusal to let that club dictate her artistry has been a major talking point throughout her career. Four years after “Good Ol’ Boys Club,” she took the stage at a “Power of Women” event held by Variety magazine to explain how, as a woman in country music, she was told that her introductory single needed to be “upbeat.” It needed to be “something that everyone is going to like.” 

The song Kacey wanted to release was “Merry Go ’Round,” in which she refuses to romanticize small-town living in ways other country songs might. It remains a damn good introduction to how she thrives off not just finding turns of phrase, but overturning conventional wisdom. The song begins: “If you don’t have two kids by 21, you’re going to die alone / at least, that’s what tradition told you.”

When Kacey said she wouldn’t be proud to compromise and pick another song for her debut, an executive replied, “Sometimes in this business, you just gotta do things you’re not proud of.”

Looking back, Kacey wonders how she could have “picked her battles differently.” Yet she’s still in awe of her foresight.

“You only get one shot to start out and present yourself to the world as a creative,” she says. If you compromise, “you’re presenting a bait-and-switch. You’re creating the whole genesis of your narrative, your story, your style, your aesthetic. If you start out trying to serve up a more palatable version of that, or a more widely accepted version of that, it’s just so dangerous, because then you’re always waiting for the next chance to really show who you are.

“I'm really grateful that I had this unrelenting vision, because  it's now allowed me to do exactly what I want to do. This business can be so hard in so many ways that there's no way I would be doing it if I didn't have that total freedom of expression. Because then what’s left? The fame? Fame is not what it’s cracked up to be. It is not something that feeds my soul. Respect for my craft is one thing, but all the other superfluous parts of this business can be really grating. At the very least, I need to have control over my vision.”

Sometimes lost in conversations about Kacey as a genre disrupter — whether she’s been honored at a “Power of Women” event, or reacting on social media to her 2021 album, star-crossed, being disqualified from country music Grammy categories — is how the country artists who came before her taught her to stay true to herself.

After all, it was Prine who inspired Kacey to write a song as if she were having an actual conversation with someone. The ability to connect with someone, in this way, is perhaps even more important because of what she wants to talk about, which isn’t small talk or pleasantries, but Am I normal? Is what I’m experiencing normal?

“When you have these really intimate thoughts all day long about yourself, and how you relate to love, and how you relate to the world, and how you relate to other people …  it’s just so comforting to have that exemplified in a song by another human. I don’t know — there’s just something so magical about that to me.”

On the surface, Deeper Well seems like a straightforward folk-pop album, inspired by the Laurel Canyon acoustic stylings of the ’60s and ’70s. In reality, Kacey’s influences are still wide-ranging, though most of the references come across as Easter eggs. She doesn’t call John Prine by his name in “Cardinal,” though he’s the one who she hopes is “bringing me a message from the other side.” “Heaven Is” interpolates a melody from a Scottish pastoral poem set to music centuries ago.

In the days after I chatted with Kacey, I texted a friend the Spotify link to “Lonely Millionaire.” “Okay I like this song,” he texts back. Less than a minute later, he realizes why. “THIS IS J.I.D.,” he types in all caps, recognizing the hook that Kacey borrowed from the Atlanta rap newcomer, from his song “Kody Blu 31.”

I asked Kacey about a rare source of inspiration in Deeper Well that she does call out by name – the comic and anime series Sailor Moon, in which monsters of the week prey on the insecurities of teenage girls, and the title character meets her first (and, spoiler, true) love. Falling in love, according to Kacey, feels like when there’s “a million little stars bursting into hearts” through her “anime eyes.” It sounds like a backup choir singing through a vocoder, before she sighs and sings, “Baby I’m a love tsunami / Sailor Moon’s got nothing on me.” 

Kacey jokes that the logic behind that line was ridiculously simple: “I mean, how fucking cute is Sailor Moon? That’s what I want to be.” 

The actual reason is only slightly more complicated than that. Sailor Moon is “these larger-than-life … these human emotions put into the cutest of aesthetics and amplified a million times.” Her  writing of the song began with the image of a pastoral “Miyazaki sky.”

The filmmaker and animator Hayao Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli, whose movies Kacey describes as “the human experience in such a painterly environment. I think American animation has largely gotten dumbed down for young viewers, but there's a lot of reverence and space held for real emotion in those animes.” (As a soundtrack-contributing artist and first-time actor, Kacey is the first voice viewers hear in Studio Ghibli’s 2021 film Earwig and the Witch.) What Kacey says about Studio Ghibli was precisely her goal for Deeper Well.

The pithiest summary of how she’s evolved can be found in the title track: “I used to wake-and-bake / roll out of bed, hit the gravity bong that I made and start the day,” she sings. But then she continues: “So I'm gettin' rid of the habits that I feel / Are real good at wastin' my time.”

(Although she still sells rolling papers and grinders on her official website, those days might be from a more distant past than we realized. The day we chatted was 4/20, and that fun fact didn’t come up once.)

But that tidbit about giving up her gravity bong isn’t the entire story, Kacey says. Ahead of the album’s release, she turned 35, an age that she describes as “one of those spots where you’re driving along the side of the road in a mountainous area — it’s a lookout point.”

She’s asked herself a lot of questions about what she wants in her future. “What's important to me? What does happiness look like? I feel like I’m surveying and collecting info about that every single day. What does love look like to me? What does true friendship look like to me? What are some goals in my life careerwise that I haven't done yet? Where do I want to live? Do I want kids? I don't know!”

But she gently rebuffs my question when I ask whether Deeper Well is an album about turning 35. For all the critical observations about her music being incredibly specific to her, she’d rather say that it points to a universal truth about the importance of being vulnerable. “It just cuts to the core of the human experience,” she says. It reminds us of “the importance of examining your personal power,” and that “sometimes your most powerful attribute is your softest.”

Music reminds her of this constantly, whenever it invites her to “work out questions about my own life.” Country music, specifically, reminds her of this. “When I was going through my last breakup, I was so sad,” she says. (She could either be referencing a two-year relationship with writer Cole Schafer, which ended as she was recording Deeper Well, or a relationship that the public doesn’t know about at all.) The best way she knew how to cope was to listen to “old-school country music that was supercentered around being completely brokenhearted.”

Hank Williams Sr. is the first artist who comes to mind, then Patsy Cline. She mentally reviews a playlist she made the other day. 

“Willie, obviously,” she says, as in Nelson.  Prine, of course. “Ray Charles is in there a little bit. Marty Robbins, Buck Owens. There's a lot of places where country sort of bucked up to other styles, too, like the Everly Brothers. Roger Miller was an amazing songwriter.”

Kacey acknowledges that sometimes art can exist purely for fun — that’s OK, and in fact, that’s necessary. But she needs reverence and space for real emotions. She learned that through Hayao Miyazaki. She learned that through Hank Williams Sr. And she’s learning that through an inner circle that she holds closer and more dear than the “Good Ol’ Boys Club” she sang about.

“I’ve been one of the boys for a long time,” she says. (Which is a plus, considering how male-dominated the industry can still be, from its songwriters to its concert tech.) But to process the emotions she sings about, she turns to “the women and feminine spirits” in her life.

Just before our call, between press and tour obligations, she spoke to a member of this inner circle. “He’s going through a hard time,” she says. “I would say even though he’s a ‘he,’ he’s a feminine spirit.

“We rely on each other to get through some of the hardest shit,” she adds. “And I mean, there are times in my life that I don't think I would have made it through like I did if I didn't have the sounding board that I had with some of the women and feminine spirits in my life.”

The moment Kacey spotted that cardinal on the honeysuckle branch, she was talking about her “Virgo energy.” For those who don’t follow astrology: “I’m not somebody who loves to see an empty calendar — that’s where my anxiety kicks in. … Everything has to be in order for me to relax.”

Somehow, despite her Virgo energy and the release of Deeper Well and tour preparation, Kacey ended up with a few weeks of white space on her calendar in April. So she went to the studio. She wasn’t sure what would happen. 

“My inspiration cycles have always moved in larger chunks of time, meaning two to three years [before] OK, here comes another wave of inspiration,” she says. And yet: “It’s been really cool to see that even though I just literally birthed a whole new baby, there’s stuff that’s still wanting to come out.”

What has come out, to her surprise, sounds like the music that she grew up singing — or yodeling. One of the first times, if not the first time, she appeared on TV was on the TODAY show. The year was 2002, and as she told Katie Couric, this eighth grader wearing a red cowboy hat over her cascading brown curls was showcasing a talent that she had been developing for two years.

Kacey was sheepish when TODAY resurfaced that yodeling footage the morning of March 15, when she was performing on air to celebrate Deeper Well’s release. But that seemed mostly because she wasn’t expecting to revisit this moment from when she was 13.

“I grew up singing extremely country music and literally wearing the cowboy hat, the fringe, the rhinestones, the cowboy boots; yodeling, singing,” she says. Her music has always reflected this, of course. But it’s telling that when she talks about her new material, she says, “It’s just been fun that lately, that has pointed more towards home.”

Because this is Kacey Musgraves, whose 2021 album star-crossed drew from inspirations as wide-ranging as Daft Punk to Sade, it’s tough to predict exactly what “home” will sound like in the end. But from the lookout point that Kacey describes as middle age, she will continue to look forward as much as she looks back. I ask how she resists complacency, at an age when complacency tends to settle in.

She jokes at first: “I think naturally, I’m a really pretty optimistic person. Even in love, I could be in a trash relationship and be like, No, but it’s great!” Then she pauses. “I don’t know where that comes from.”

Then she really thinks about it. She’s part of a generation that wants to remove the stigma around mental health, and will talk about therapy openly. “It’s easy to look around in your life and witness people that are really living in the shallow end, because it’s easier to stay there,” she acknowledges. But Kacey doesn’t want that.

“A devil’s advocate is sometimes a good thing. I think love can be … it can be so healing, but it is  … well, it is healing because it’s a challenge.”

Whether it’s through therapy or through friends she catches up with over the phone, she wants to be “called out on her bullshit.”

She talks about “owning” your shadow. 

“If you find someone who, I don't know, act[s] like they don’t have shadows, that’s a massive red flag. The shadows themselves maybe aren't the red flag sometimes — it's how willing you are to face them and own them. And I think moving into this next phase in my life, whoever it is that I end up with, I just really hope that they are really good at looking their shadows in the face and say, Sometimes I do this or I’m built this way — and to be curious about that! I think those are the things that literally make us better. I think it’s trying to understand my shadows: What are my shortcomings? How is the way that I was raised — how has that affected me as an adult, and the ways that I give and receive love, you know?”

It’s my turn to take a beat. She laughs with me: Now she’s the one asking the right questions. 

“It’s the million-dollar question, right?” she says.

The day Deeper Well was released, Kacey performed the album in full for the first time at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, which she calls “sacred and hallowed ground.” The building, a former tabernacle, is a National Historic Landmark and hosted the Grand Ole Opry for over 30 years. 

It was not her first time there. That came in 2012, just days before it was announced that she would open for John Mayer on tour, and one month before her debut album, Same Trailer, Different Park. Her grandparents had flown in from Texas so they could watch her sing about “growing up in a small town in the South.”

The rest of the crowd wasn’t prepared for what’s become her signature song, “Merry ’Go Round.” When she sang, “Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay / brother’s hooked on Mary Jane / and Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down,” the crowd laughed, and then clapped, even though the song wasn’t halfway over.

This time, returning to the Ryman more than a decade later, Kacey was the one caught off guard. 

She remembers entering the stage feeling shakier than normal. Maybe it’s just nerves. Maybe it’s just nerves and I’ll get through this, she told herself.

But as she performed Deeper Well’s third track, “Too Good to be True,” Kacey stopped singing during the first verse, the part where she compares love to “a tidal wave without warning.”

“Can’t. Can’t do it.” she said, shaking her head. She tried singing again during the hook, but instead mustered an apology, holding back tears.

Looking back, Kacey swears that she was “ugly crying.” “It was the first time I heard anybody singing back any of the lyrics to me with this album,” she says. And she remembers those voices being so loud. “It just completely punched me in the fucking face.”

“I don’t physically love to show a lot of emotion sometimes — I don’t know why. Maybe that’s being an older sister, or being a Leo Texan, whatever the fuck that is. I have a pretty good poker face. But it really just — it cut me so deeply, hearing this sea of voices singing this thing back to you that came from such a raw place.”

In the hook for “Too Good to be True,” Kacey strikes a deal, tentatively and tenderly. “Please don’t make me regret / opening up that part of myself,” she pleads. “I’ve been scared to give again / Be good to me. …”

At the Ryman,  the crowd already knew the rest: “Be good to me, and I’ll be good to you.”  ◊

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