You only have to listen to the last few weeks in pop music to understand that, yes, Saturn has very much returned. There are its icy rings barging into Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine in “Saturn Returns Interlude,” a brief explainer about the astrological notion that after the 29 years or so it takes for Saturn to orbit the sun, major life transitions may ensue. SZA begged its ammonia-yellow light to shine on her in Lana teaser “Saturn.” And now here is Kacey Musgraves, welcoming back the gassy giant to remind her that some people are givers and some are takers and she’s well shot of the latter on “Deeper Well,” the title track of her sixth studio album.
The pro forma language of astrology, tarot, and therapy is all over the charts lately. These are great boons to the famous: ways for them to venture relatability without disclosure, and to make the listener feel centered in the music, too. While you, a civilian, may never know what it’s like to feel dogged by deuxmoi, I’m a Leo and so are you! On the endlessly pretty Deeper Well, Musgraves encounters energy vampires, boundaries, moon bathing, the mycelium network, the power of jade stone, and breaking patterns that no longer serve her; the song “Dinner With Friends” is a torn-out gratitude journal page. The wistful folksy vibe is very much “pottering around your local wellness shop picking up crystals and sniffing the hand-rolled palo santo incense.” Sageing my cynicism momentarily, these things seem to have genuinely helped Musgraves as a person, and all power to her. But as songwriting concerns, they wash out the erstwhile country radical’s incisiveness, her winks, her delightfully subverted cliches, and turn a beloved outsider into a solipsist. Once she’s sweetly bid “goodbye to the people that I feel are real good at wasting my time” on the second song, the world outside is all but gone.
Deeper Well is Musgraves’ back-to-basics record after 2021’s conflicted star-crossed. Written after her divorce from fellow country singer Ruston Kelly, the lyrics were fragile and vulnerable but came in sleek pop packaging with Lemonade-sized ambitions. It didn’t connect in the same way as her 2018 psychedelic opus Golden Hour. You might imagine her next step to be another corrective, whether commercial or creative, but Deeper Well beats a further retreat. “I don’t care for money or fame,” Musgraves sings on an album that exudes disregard in its rainy-day strums and glazed vocal refrains. There are teases of more compelling directions not taken: Those lyrics are from highlight “Heaven Is,” which, like “Jade Green,” has the mournful formality of traditional British folk in its spindles. The influence of Nick Drake and Linda Thompson collides with Musgraves’ Texan roots on the yearning opener “Cardinal,” which unavoidably evokes “California Dreamin’”—but also the impeccable The Trials of Van Occupanther by her fellow Lone Star druids Midlake. It makes the idea of Musgraves striking out on a folk-rock quest over the existential plains sound extremely appealing.
Instead, the understated music on Deeper Well fits its theme: Comfort and care are life’s biggest prizes and the fear of upending that careful balance is what keeps you up at night. (“I think about you often/Worrying that I might drive/The nail into the coffin,” from “Nothing to Be Scared Of,” might be the album’s best lyric.) When there are details, they are delicate: “Giver/Taker,” one of several songs about how all one really needs is love, is sparsely wreathed with banjo and cello and has an intricate beauty. “The Architect,” the lone song with Musgraves’ old core co-writer, Shane McAnally, sticks out for its nesting Russian doll structure, mirroring Musgraves’ worried spiral about whether there’s logic to the universe.
Awareness of death hovers over some of these songs—“Cardinal” remembers a lost friend and wonders if a bird is bringing “a message from the other side” and the self-possessed “Dinner With Friends” loses some of its saccharine quality when Musgraves reveals that she’s imagining what she “would miss from the other side”—yet there’s rarely more than a shadow to the arrangements. From someone who flipped off the country establishment and vaulted beyond it two albums back, it’s perversely captivating to witness her sounding so cautious. The palliative “Sway” is about Musgraves’ desire to “let go” so that “maybe one day/I’ll learn how to sway.” The sunflower-bright wooziness suggests she’s got that licked.
For an album predicated on having cast off the superficial shit, Deeper Well is frustratingly short on what happens when you really wiggle your toes in the dirt. On the title track, Musgraves remembers her curiosity as a small-town Texan kid: Her family had what they needed, “but the world was as flat as a plate/And that’s OK/The things I was taught/Only took me so far/Had to figure the rest out myself,” smartly acknowledging her pride in her roots and her instinct that the picture was bigger than she had been told. As a young woman she developed an expansive and discerning worldview that brought her this far, which gets a cursory nod in “Dinner With Friends” when she memorializes “my home state of Texas/The sky there, the horses and dogs/But none of their laws.” Her inquiring eye, once so sharp on hypocrisy and sanctimony, is now a bit rheumy. The midnight campfire strum of “Heart of the Woods” takes the fungal web that lets plants communicate as a toothless metaphor for how it’s human nature “to look out for each other … when there is danger.” It sounds like a dream because it is one. Similarly, the tastefully twilit (and unusually hooky) “Lonely Millionaire” finds a pop star reminding her listeners that money and diamonds “can’t buy you true happiness.”
Deeper Well is the latest addition to a canon of refusenik pop records from young women burned by the spotlight: Lorde’s Solar Power, Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever, Ariana Grande’s post-2018 output, Hayley Williams’ Petals for Armor, Clairo’s Sling, even perhaps Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore. They are curious artifacts. It is entirely positive that we have started to reckon with the toll that business demands and grossly unfair scrutiny take on these archetypal figures. These records are often products and expressions of the therapy necessitated by that toll, embodying the revelations about quietude and self-worth that therapy so often suggests. Yet they still exist in a pop infrastructure and function, as pop unavoidably does in this moment, as celebrity texts. This creates some tension between why they’re made and who they best serve. 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.
I almost feel guilty for saying the poppiest song is the standout: “Anime Eyes” is as gorgeously weird as the best of Golden Hour, a paean to a lover who makes stars and hearts burst from Musgraves’ lashes as if they were besotted cartoon teenagers. It spirals skyward on a rapturous rush of memories that stumbles adorably, backed by Daft Punk-robotic vocal effects. For the length of the middle-eight, you understand exactly how it feels to be transformed by cosmic forces beyond your control.
