Deeper Well

About

“My Saturn has returned,” the cosmic country singer-songwriter proclaimed to announce her fifth album (apologies to <i>A Very Kacey Christmas</i>), <i>Deeper Well</i>. If you’re reading thi, odds are you know what that means: About every 30 year, the sixth planet from the sun comes back to the place in the sky where it was when you were born, and with it, ostensibly, comes growth. At 35, the chill princess of rule-breaking country/pop/what-have-you has caught up with Saturn and taken its lessons to heart. OUT: energy vampire, self-sabotaging habit, surface-level conversation. IN: jade stone, moon bath, long dinners with friend, listening closely to the whispered messages of the cosmo. (As for the wake-and-bake sessions she mentions on the title track—out, but wistfully so.) Musgraves followed her 2018 breakthrough album, the gently trippy <i>Golden Hour</i>, with 2021’s <i>star-crossed</i>, a divorce album billed as a “tragedy in three part,” where electronic flourishes added to the drama. On <i>Deeper Well</i>, the songwriter’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, reflected in its warm, wooden, organic instrumentation—fingerpicked acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel. Here, Musgraves turns to nature for the answers to her ever-probing question. “Heart of the Wood,” a campfire sing-along inspired by mycologist Paul Stamets and his <i>Fantastic Fungi</i> documentary, looks to mushroom networks beneath the forest floor for lessons on connectivity. And on “Cardinal,” a gorgeous ode to her late friend and mentor John Prine in the paisley mode of The Mamas & The Papa, potential dispatches from the beyond arrive as a bird outside her window in the morning. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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