Words by Marshall Heyman

In “Follow Your Arrow,” one of Kacey Musgraves’ most well-known songs from her 2013 album breakout album Same Trailer Different Park, she sings about the impossibility of pleasing everyone all the time. “You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t/So you might as well just do whatever you want.”

In the refrain, Musgraves continues to offer more sound advice. She tells us to “make lots of noise,” to “kiss lots of boys” or “kiss lots of girls (if that’s something you’re into).” “Roll up a joint, or don’t,” she says. The only imperative is that you “follow your arrow wherever it points.”

If there’s one thing you can say about the Texas-born singer-songwriter, Musgraves certainly follows her own arrow and beats to her own banjo.

That comes up in so many aspects of Musgraves’ life and personality. She believes in UFOs and is afraid of being abducted by aliens. She’s had, she says, “at least four different sightings, though there have definitely been more than that.” One of her unusual guilty pleasures: egg rolls from the fast-food chain Jack in the Box. And yes, she has won yodeling national championships.

Musgraves’ unique individuality has earned her a loyal fan base, even outside of the Country genre. It has also garnered her seven Grammy Awards, including one this year for “I Remember Everything,” a song she sang with Zach Bryan. Side note: Musgraves recorded “I Remember Everything” with an angry sore throat. “In the moment I was frustrated because I couldn’t tap into my normal tone,” she recalls. An immediate trip from the studio to her doctor’s office confirmed that she did, indeed, have strep.

A Grammy for a song recorded while suffering with strep throat? That’s pretty impressive for anyone, let alone a woman who was awarded seventh runner-up, in 2007, on the fifth season of the reality competition show Nashville Star. (Miranda Lambert didn’t win either when she competed on season one. She finished in third place, though.)

Most recently, Musgraves’ arrow pointed her up to New York City where she recorded her latest album Deeper Well, out now.

“I had never gone to another destination to create music,” Musgraves says, on a mid-February Zoom video call from Nashville where it had snowed the night before. She’s lived in Tennessee since 2008. It’s where she’s written and recorded all her recent albums. “I really love the city,” Musgraves adds. “It’s a sweet place to live.”

Musgrave didn’t feel a lot of pressure to complete a new record. She’d released her fifth studio album, Star-Crossed, in 2021, after 2018’s Golden Hour swept the Grammys. “But I was craving something a bit different energy-wise. Interesting things can come out when you’re away from home,” she says. “I kept feeling this pull towards New York. I’ve always wanted the true New York City experience.”

Musgraves thought, what if she spent some time in downtown Manhattan, amongst the sights, the smells and the sounds? What if she recorded at the famous (and infamous) Electric Lady Studios in the Village, where Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Blondie, David Bowie, and the Clash all had recorded some music? What might she come up with? Musgraves wasn’t sure.

“But I found it really inspiring,” she says. “I was pleasantly surprised at how natural it was to create there.”

The result is Deeper Well, perhaps Musgraves’ most personal collection yet. A more natural folk sound, she says, emerged while she was working in the biggest city in the world. “I really tapped into this rootsy side of myself. There’s a conundrum there that’s interesting for such a maximalist city with so much mood and electricity,” she says. “I found a really good negative space in the songs.”

While Star-Crossed was about a specific relationship, Deeper Well, Musgraves says, is a more mature work that shares her observations on the intricacies of life.

“I would say that at 35, where I’m at now, I’ve learned so much since my last record. I definitely know myself better,” Musgraves says. “I’ve thought so much about what love looks like to me. Why do I choose the people I keep choosing? What is the lesson there? Will I keep making the same choices over and over again? Will I take the information I’ve learned and apply it to the next situation? ”

There are a lot of ruminations on Deeper Well about “the other side, about where do we go when we die?” Musgraves continues. “How much control do we have? Is there something pushing things along? Why are people suffering so much?”

“As I get older, I realize I crave emotional depth”

Ultimately, she explains, writing and recording the new record made her realize something incredibly important: “I have less time for bullshit.”

Musgraves grew up in Golden, Texas, a town 80 miles east of Dallas. It’s a small place on the Texan map. In the year 2000, when Musgraves was 12, Golden had a population of 156. One of its more significant claims to fame is an annual Sweet Potato Festival that has taken place on the fourth Saturday in October since 1982.

The daughter of an artist (her mom) and the owner of a small printing press (her dad), Musgraves has spoken about being born six weeks prematurely. That’s not the only thing she did early and precociously. She also started writing songs at a young age. Her first effort, “Notice Me,” which she wrote at the age of eight, ended up having a particularly prescient title. By 12, she was learning how to play the guitar and became one half of a kids’ country music duo called Texas Two Bits.

At 14, Musgraves sang the national anthem during the 2002 Winter Olympics. She also released her first solo album, funded by her family. At 18, not long after moving to Austin, she made her debut on Nashville Star. Five years later, she released “Merry Go ‘Round,” her first solo single on Mercury Nashville. It was about the tedious, booze-filled, God-fearing treadmill of what it’s like to live in a small town in America, like, one assumes, Golden.

Even today, Musgraves remains close to her family. She and her younger sister, Kelly, a photographer, constantly discuss their obsession with estate sales. They use an app that tells you what estate sales are happening in a given week in a 10-mile radius. In general, Kelly makes it to more estate sales than Kacey does, so her success ratio at finding treasures tends to be on the higher side.

And for her most recent trip to the Grammys, Musgraves brought her 86-year-old grandmother Barbara as her date. (Fans also know Barbara from her appearance on The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show.) Kacey and Barbara are a regular and dynamic duo on the social circuit, especially since Musgraves split from her husband, singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, in 2020 after a four-year marriage.

“Gran” is the perfect date, Musgraves says. “Actually, she kind of loves famous people.” At the Grammys, Barbara was particularly excited, for instance, to spy Meryl Streep.

“In a situation like [the Grammys], you can get tunnel vision,” she adds. “Having someone who’s really deeply rooted in your world, who doesn’t get to experience it regularly, helps you stop and appreciate what’s happening around you.”

Musgraves has been the belle of that ball several times over. “I’ve already won more [Grammys] than I could ever imagine,” she says. Still, each time she picks up a new one, “it doesn’t not feel amazing. It’s a great honor. It will never not be a massive honor to be recognized for something you’ve really put your heart into, but it’s also something you can’t fully live and die by. There’s no way you can predict what’s going to be popular.”

One of the later tracks on Deeper Well is a bouncy love song called “Anime Eyes.” “When I look at you, I’m always looking through anime eyes,” Musgraves sings to an unknown someone. “A million little stars, bursting into hearts in anime eyes.”

“I can spot the melancholy in every situation, even the good ones”

Despite the requited feelings she seems to have discovered in this relationship, Musgraves still emphasizes the sadness that it takes to get there. “Made it through the tears to see a Miyazaki sky, now it’s you and I and we’re flying.”

Musgraves has loved anime—especially the work of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki—since she was little. When she was seven, her dad brought home a VHS copy of My Neighbor Totoro, about two little girls in a small town, grieving for their unwell mother, who encounter spirits in the forest.

“I was just so mystified by that tape,” Musgraves recalls. “I’d just watch it over and over again.”

A few years ago, Musgraves voiced a character in the English dub of Miyazaki’s Earwig and the Witch. “It was a massive bucket list thing to me,” she says. She was equally enchanted by Miyazaki’s most recent film, The Boy and the Heron, which, she admits, she went on some Miyazaki Reddit pages to try to understand.

“I don’t think [The Boy and the Heron] was intended to be spelled out super clearly. I’m not sure we’re supposed to get it,” Musgraves says of the film, though she could be equally talking about life in general. “I like that though, in a world where there’s not much mystery left. I kind of appreciate that. Still, I deeply want to know what the intent was.”

Musgraves appreciates Miyazaki’s genius. He shows animals, situations, and circumstances that are beautiful but also grotesque. She likes how his films reveal an enchanting, nostalgic bittersweetness. That they live in a melancholy space.

Musgraves often lives in the melancholy, too. “For better or worse, I can spot the melancholy in every situation, even the good ones.”  She admits she’s particularly agile at making a song “instantly sound sadder than it actually is.” For example, take her recent cover of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” There’s a soft plaintiveness to her assurance that “Every little thing is gonna be all right.”

Melancholy is one of the multitude colors in her “creative coloring bin.” “It’s always around in the background and in the foreground,” she says. “I even have a song about it.” That would be “Happy and Sad” from Golden Hour.

“I’m the kinda person who starts getting kind of nervous when I’m having the time of my life,” she sings on that track. “Is there a word for the way that I’m feeling tonight? Happy and sad at the same time. You got me smiling with tears in my eyes.”

“It can be easy for me to say in a situation, ‘This is such a great moment, but it’s also about to be over,’” Musgraves reflects. “Life goes by so quickly, and the passage of time just fucks me up.”

To that end, Musgraves says her current motto is: “If it’s not a fucking ‘Hell Yes’ across the board, then it’s a ‘Hell No.’ There’s not really time and energy for middle ground.” The essence of Deeper Well, she explains, is that transactional, superficial interactions are only that. “A whole day of small talk is really exhausting. It’s one dimensional,” she explains. “I need substance with people, history with people. It feels good to be seen, even if it’s by a small amount of people. As I get older, I realize I crave emotional depth. It feels good to be known.”

Musgraves says that she’s always on the road for self improvement. She’s not super into regular therapy sessions, but she’ll go in for a tune-up on occasion. She reads tidbits of self-help books. She takes meditation courses, goes on retreats. “I seek a lot of counsel with my own friends, my genuinely amazing female friends,” she says. “I’m lucky that I have people in my life that are truthful.”

“The passage of time just fucks me up”

On the new track “Sway,” Musgraves ruminates about her anxiety: “Most of the time, the thoughts in my mind keep me running. Show me a place I can just think of nothing.” Maybe one day, she sings, “I’ll learn how to sway.”

“I can be a bit of a control freak,” Musgrave admits. Swaying, Musgrave explains, is the opposite of “bending and breaking. It’s about moving with the flow versus rigidly holding on.”

We’d all be better off, she thinks, if we could just sway more. “I’m probably at my most happy when I’m not trying to control as much.”

It’s bittersweet, even melancholy, for Musgraves to release a record into the world.

Producing an album like Deeper Well is a satisfying and therapeutic process, Musgraves says “You’re recording a record with your friends. You talk about life and order food and create and laugh, and when that’s done, it’s as if summer camp’s over,” she says.

First, there’s the anxiety of surrendering to its completion, “letting go from the process of pushing it out the door,” she says. “There’s always can I make this better? Can I tighten this up? Could we have added a song? But there’s that ‘Kacey, we have to put the pencil down’ moment. A deadline can be good for creatives. You can overwork a project to death.”

Before a new album drops, Musgraves says, “It’s still in the womb. It’s yours. It’s in such a sweet spot. It’s shielded from outside opinion.” As soon as Deeper Well comes out, it will belong to everyone else, too. Going out and promoting a record, entering the cycle of facing her public, tends to be a challenge for Musgraves. Still, there’s nothing to be scared of “as long as you protect your own boundaries,” she says.

“But I’m really a homebody,” Musgrave continues. “In my daily life, I spend a lot of time with my dog by the fireplace and my small group of friends.”

In the last year, Musgraves adds, she’s become something of a reader, something of which she’s particularly proud. She read The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah, whose length intimidated her. “But I got through it,” Musgraves says. “I fucking did it.” She’s also read a lot of Augusten Burroughs, some Mary Karr (a fellow Texan), and a bit of the late Nora Ephron, whose writings inspired the new song “Dinner With Friends.”

Musgraves was particularly struck by a list of things Ephron made that she would miss when she was gone. Among them were mostly simple: Waffles. Bacon. Butter. Coming over the bridge to Manhattan. Pride and Prejudice. And, yes, dinner with friends “in cities where none of us lives.”

Musgraves has taken to keeping her own similar list. Things that are on it, so far, include: Cooking, which Musgraves has gotten into lately, including a “lot of yummy veggies” and perfecting a ribeye steak. Her air fryer. A good television show to binge watch. Meditating or practicing yoga with someone else. The occasional glass of wine with a friend. Estate sales.

The estate sale, especially, brings up some of Musgraves’ innate melancholy. Going to one makes her think about “all those souvenirs from trips, all the personal things at the end of our life.” What do those objects mean when “they’re on a table for five dollars and a stranger deems if it’s a good sale or not.”

But it’s in disentangling those complexities that she finds her inspiration. From “the moments between moments.” From “being awake and tuned in and really appreciating the small things,” she says. “From arguments and tiny realizations.” From “going through changes.”

Basically, from life, Musgraves explains.

“It’s all beautiful and terrifying at the same time,” she says.

Words by Marshall Heyman, Photography by Nino Muñoz, Styling by J. Errico

Read GRAZIA USA’s Spring Issue featuring cover star Kacey Musgraves: