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Musgraves seeks wellness, not revenge

BY MIKAEL WOOD

Kacey Musgraves’ video is still online.

Posted (at least for the moment) in the digital portfolio of the woman who shot it, the 6-minute minimovie set to the Weepies’ “Gotta Have You” lovingly depicts Musgraves’ 2017 nuptials in all their artisanal farmhouse glory: Here’s the acclaimed country singer in her white gown as she nuzzles a horse festooned with flowers; here’s her husbandto-be, fellow musician Ruston Kelly, pecking out his vows on a vintage typewriter.

It’s all very sweet and festive, though now — barely a year after Musgraves ended the marriage that inspired her Grammy-winning 2018 album “Golden Hour” — the video is laced with the phantom sorrow of what’s to come.

Country music history is full of juicy divorce records: Willie Nelson’s “Phases and Stages,” Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-RC-E,” Miranda Lambert’s “The Weight of These Wings.” But Musgraves’ frustrating new LP, “Star-crossed,” catches the 33-year-old at a transitional point — less a plain-talking country act than a slippery pop star in waiting.

Musgraves has been voicing her doubts about tradition since she broke out of Nashville nearly a decade ago. With its mellow disco grooves and its lightly psychedelic textures, though, the gorgeous and moving “Golden Hour” effectively reframed Musgraves’ career; soon she was playing Coachella, touring with Harry Styles, cutting duets with Lana Del Rey and Troye Sivan.

And she’s clearly following a pop playbook in terms of rollout, with an accompanying short film (a la Beyonce’s “Lemonade”) and a performance scheduled for Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards.

Yet “Star-crossed” is actually a less emotional experience than the blissed-out “Golden Hour,” which practically vibrated with feeling. Perhaps that’s because her marriage died quietly. In interviews, the singer has suggested that she and Kelly simply drifted apart.

And sometimes she catches that small-scale heartbreak, as on “Camera Roll,” about resisting the urge to scroll through the photos she can’t bring herself to delete, and the exquisite “Hookup Scene,” in which she describes how hard it is to replace an intimate connection.

More often than not, though, Musgraves’ writing on “Starcrossed” is squishier and more prone to cliche than on “Golden Hour” or her earlier albums; she fears she’s “going off the deep end” on “Simple Times” and recounts her trip “to hell and back” on “What Doesn’t Kill Me.” On “If This Was a Movie” she sings about all the ways in which art fails to capture the complexity of real life.

You can hear these soft landing spots as part of the interest in wellness culture the singer has been talking about lately; certainly, only a churl would begrudge her whatever comfortable space she needs to heal from her divorce. Or maybe it just turns out Musgraves is the rare songwriter more effective in happy mode than sad — the clearest sign yet that she’s left country music behind.

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2021-09-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/282265258549859

The Gazette, Colorado Springs