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The country star’s sixth album is an endlessly pretty back-to-basics record focused on growing and bettering oneself. It’s a balm, even if her sharp songwriting has dulled a bit.

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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.

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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.

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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.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kacey-musgraves-deeper-well/

You can't say "all power to her" and then call someone a "solipsist" in the same paragraph. These people are so bitter. 

9 minutes ago, elevate said:

You can't say "all power to her" and then call someone a "solipsist" in the same paragraph. These people are so bitter. 

I mean, they said "all power to her" about her personal life and prefaced the other comment with "as songwriting concerns..."

 

I think it's an insult to Kacey's artistry to claim these songs are anywhere near her peak - I've felt the same way about the devolution of her songwriting. 

7 minutes ago, suburbannature said:

I mean, they said "all power to her" about her personal life and prefaced the other comment with "as songwriting concerns..."

 

I think it's an insult to Kacey's artistry to claim these songs are anywhere near her peak - I've felt the same way about the devolution of her songwriting. 

Has the album leaked already? I've only heard the first two and the vibe of crystal cottage lady definitely fits, and I enjoyed that. Both songs are well-written and fit that tone. I prefer the broader topics touched on in Golden Hour, but the writing prowess hasn't shifted in some momentous way. It's not clicking with me that you can understand the theme of comfort and care, as the writer has, and then label that as selfish, lol. It's okay to not enjoy the topic, though.

14 minutes ago, suburbannature said:

I mean, they said "all power to her" about her personal life and prefaced the other comment with "as songwriting concerns..."

 

I think it's an insult to Kacey's artistry to claim these songs are anywhere near her peak - I've felt the same way about the devolution of her songwriting. 

The songwriting is a direct product of her personal life though, you can’t truly separate the two..

1 minute ago, PoisonedIvy said:

The songwriting is a direct product of her personal life though, you can’t truly separate the two..

Well, you can, but the problem they're conveying is not the content itself but the regression of her writing, landing in a hyper-cautious area. 

 

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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 ****, 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.”

 

That's.. unexpectedly low. But I'll reserve my judgement for when I hear the actual thing. 

I'm like 99% sure this album will be better than star-crossed but this critic seems to be hung up on her regression from Golden Hour to star-crossed and too focused on trying to make that into some sort of narrative.

can’t wait to listen!! but then again i feel like i was one of the only people who genuinely enjoyed star-crossed, bad two or three songs 

Well that's why P4K's done as an entity. During the last 5 years especially, they have reviewed an artist's interviews instead of the album itself. And they've done it again.

her solar power 

becoming more specifically personal is not a regression  Snapes is such a hack

deserved

Aren't they busy being bankrupt

3 hours ago, suburbannature said:

I think it's an insult to Kacey's artistry to claim these songs are anywhere near her peak - I've felt the same way about the devolution of her songwriting. 

I feel there’s been a noticeable decline in her lyricism ever since Tashian and Fitchuk replaced McAnally, Osborne, Laird, and Clark as her main cowriters. She wrote 4 or 5 good songs with Tashian and Fitchuk for Golden Hour, but overall her collaborations with them have been weak and unremarkable to the point where it’s a real hindrance that she continues working almost exclusively with them.

whoever reviewed this is not a good journalist and doesn't understand the album and how kacey writes her lyrics

37 minutes ago, Achilles. said:

I feel there’s been a noticeable decline in her lyricism ever since Tashian and Fitchuk replaced McAnally, Osborne, Laird, and Clark as her main cowriters. She wrote 4 or 5 good songs with Tashian and Fitchuk for Golden Hour, but overall her collaborations with them have been weak and unremarkable to the point where it’s a real hindrance that she continues working almost exclusively with them.

Deeper Well's lyricism is one of the reasons why (and my friends) love the song. Like it's literally about addiction and moving on from bad habits that isolate one's self from the people you love. And as person who stopped smoking weed everyday after like seven years (and all my friends are sober from alcohol), we all have literally cried to that song. Nobody has been this straight up honest/relatable when it comes to this topic in in such a smart (and kinda funny) way. Personally don't see how her lyricism is getting the blame here. 

It sounds like a regular Kacey album and they just got tired of hyping up her sthick. I hate when they acclaim artists and then spit them out with mid reviews for a few albums 

Kacey getting the St. Vincent treatment I see

Hmmmm.. I haven't loved any of the pre-release songs but they were definitely better than most of star-crossed. Feel like pure sh*t just want Golden Hour/Pageant Material Kacey back xx

9 hours ago, elevate said:

You can't say "all power to her" and then call someone a "solipsist" in the same paragraph. These people are so bitter. 

I was about to disagree with you but then I remembered that I’m no longer a brooding philosophy major in college and that in a casual context “solipsist” is actually a major insult lmfaoo  

 

yeah you’re so right, it’s weird and passive-aggressive, like they’re very much trying to distance themselves from her and say like “well, good for her and good for people who relate to her but we’re built different and wouldn’t dare write like that.” if anything, this makes me want to check out the album more. it’s reminding me of the St. Vincent Daddy’s Home review, but honestly every poorly written pitchfork review nowadays harkens back to that for me. it’s lazy writing and not only could I write better but most people on this website whose opinions are well-thought out (and there are plenty I’m thinking of including you of course) could write way better than these dorks 

Pretty on spot

it is not even a bad score lol 

Her first three albums are pretty obviously better so I don’t see how it’s an unfair review.