By Emma Kidger
Six time grammy award winner Kacey Musgraves has just released her newest album Star-Crossed. While still under the country genre, Musgrave also features a mixture of latin, folk and disco music. Based on her very open divorce, the album travels through emotions of sorrow and hurt, ending with feelings of hope and acceptance of the past. Musgraves’ brilliant song organization allows the listener to feel the same way she does even if they’ve never personally been through events similar to divorce. Any listener or fan of Kacey Musgraves can find some event in their life to easily connect to her songs. While some of the songs on the album sound very alike to her pivotal and renowned album Golden Hour, there’s still something unique and groundbreaking about Star-Crossed.
With the new album, Musgraves wanted to start with an extremely clean slate. This meant a new band, new sound, and new way of connecting to her music. While she used to write about the joys of being in love, Musgraves had to find a way to show the negatives and possible consequences of love. “Let me set the scene,” Musgraves begins her very first song on the album alluding her relationship to Shakespere’s Romeo and Juliet. After the album title song she travels through doubts of being a stereotypical wife, finally coming to the realization that being grown up is not all it’s jazzed up to be. After the fourth song on the album, heartbreak truly begins to unfold. Following “if this was a movie…” and “camera roll,” listeners can feel the change in emotion from being attached to someone verus looking back on the time spent together. Fortunately, Musgraves doesn’t end the album on a sad note and follows up with “there is a light,” displaying the hope she has for her future, despite the heartbreak she has endured.
So far, the vulnerable yet heartbreaking album has been deemed a great success. According to the Rolling stones, Musgraves’ “hard-won existential realism feels like a victory.” In my eyes, it is going to be very hard for Kacey Musgraves to ever top Golden Hour however Star-Crossed is a close second. There are some tracks on the album that sound like your basic pop song like “breadwinner” or “keep lookin up,” but when it comes to songs like “easier said” then we are playing in a completely different ball game. Overall, Musgraves’ albums continue to surprise me and others, with the unique take on the often dismissed country genre.
To learn more about the making and stories behind the album, I highly encourage you to watch this interview of Kacey Musgraves with Apple Musics’ Zane Lowe! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV-wV6Av0VQ
Also, make sure to stream the album Star-Crossed!!