Kacey’s music continues to evolve! Is it deeper? Well…
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[5.94]
Hannah Jocelyn: Kacey Musgraves makes the second-best Kacey Musgraves song we’re covering today.
[5]
Aaron Bergstrom: “Deeper Well” sounds like someone else trying to write a Kacey Musgraves song without fully understanding why that’s something people would want. Over the course of Musgraves’ first three albums, culminating in the near-perfect Golden Hour, we got to know this incredibly likeable, relatable songwriter. Her little nods to things like cannabis and astrology were fun quirks, but never core to her appeal. Now it seems like she views herself as some kind of novelty act, Spacey Kacey as caricature, and so to get back on track after the relative flop of star-crossed she’s maxed out those specific character attributes. As a result we get a flat triangulation of a song with clunky references to gravity bongs and Saturn returns that seem disconnected to the point of being meaningless.
[4]
Dave Moore: Lesser Kacey Musgraves even before the gravity bong shows up. The songwriting’s gone mushy and circular, which is a shame because minor Musgraves is often charming (my low-key favorite song from her first album is still “I Miss You”). She seems to think that her tell-don’t-show version of finding purpose, which somehow has more crackpot woo-woo in it than friggin’ Kesha, is going to make up for the fact that, songwise, she’s not going anywhere.
[5]
Isabel Cole: Astrology is fake but I too have felt the power of the Saturn return — not an overnight transformation but the dawning sense that perhaps after all I could choose something other than what had felt foreordained by my own gravity, a force that once had seemed to me more immovable than the stars. I love how gently Musgraves bids farewell to the past here: “no regrets, baby, I just think that maybe it’s natural when things lose their shine.” Many things are worth doing for a while; few things are worth doing forever. It’s a perspective on growing up not as an abandonment of the youthful self but simply as a movement into new territory. And the song is so pretty, in an easy way that sounds lovelier to my ears every time I listen — pretty like morning light in summer, unhurried, serene.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: Oh, so this song was co-written by Daniel Tashian, son of the legendary Barry and Holly Tashian, songwriters of “I’ll Take My Time Going Home”? You mean this had no other choice than to be good? That’s not fair!? I wanted a choice in thinking this was OK!
[9]
Taylor Alatorre: “Deeper Well” illustrates its core concept a bit too faithfully for its own good. It revolves around a musical holding pattern which is meant to serve as a sonic rendering of our dangerously seductive habits and circular tendencies, then lingers about too long in this pretty but hidebound pattern of its own making. Good for a master’s thesis in music composition, not so much for a lead single teased at the Super Bowl. Its saving grace is how it departs from the divisive sound of star-crossed without reading as a mewling apology for it, instead sounding like the genuine product of a woman who’s had her dial turned to Sirius XM’s The Bridge for the past six months (been there).
[5]
Will Rivitz: In much the same way earth-shattering acid trip revelations translate unremarkably to plain English, “Deeper Well” relays its life lessons in the pedestrian scrawl of a hazy afterglow Notes app attempt. With few descriptive details sans a single reference to a gravity bong, Musgraves’ (admittedly correct) insights that “some people are not worth my energy, smoking weed all day can be a waste of time, and it’s OK that I grew up in a small town” come across flat. That she’s backed by a track as insubstantial as her pen does her no favors.
[4]
Leah Isobel: “You got dark energy / Something I can’t unsee” is such a terrible line it honestly makes me wonder if Golden Hour was even any good. That twinkling, felt-coated piano at the high end does ease my doubts — but only a little.
[3]
Michael Hong: This is Kacey Musgraves diving into the lifestyle influencer grift (self-help manual to follow), her voice doubled to take on a detached yet authoritative sheen. It lacks nuance, yet you search for it anyway — for me, it’s the way she sings “I found a deeper well,” the melody left hanging, the thought left incomplete. Against all reason, I’m sitting here at the bottom of it, waiting and still wondering what comes next.
[6]
Katherine St. Asaph: Hot take: “You’ve got dark energy” is fine (scansion aside). It’s “my Saturn has returned” that’s the deeper embarrassment, and I’m not sure how one dislikes the first bit of woo while being fine with the other. Anyway, this is basically “Merry Go Round” grown shaggy and unkempt and sprouting little weeds of “The Sound of Silence,” plus the me-first self-care message beloved of inspirational pop culture. Think “Yes, And?” with the subtext of cheating swapped out for a subtext of depression. Kacey just seems so unenthused, so resigned; the future she sings about doesn’t seem to offer joy, just the lack of sunk costs. The subtext is so unconcealed and consistent that it feels like it must be deliberate — but it can’t be deliberate, because no one ever portrays this kind of mindset as bad. Or maybe it can’t be deliberate because, judging by the arrangement, the deeper well she’s found might just be reverb.
[6]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The central tension in “Deeper Well” is that the growth and wellness that Kacey is singing about sounds like it came from a deeply unwell place. She says goodbye to relationships that no longer fulfill her, drugs that no longer bring her the highs they used to, and dark energy that can’t be unseen—but through it all, she sounds the most contemplative and at peace she has been in years. Adulthood is about coming to terms with the fact that the choices that you made were the best decisions you had at the time, and about learning to forgive yourself for not having all of the answers—about love, friendship, self-care—magically from the start. How can a process that feels so ego-shattering and devastating ultimately be so good for us—and how can we forgive ourselves for fighting it? As a 27-year-old, I’m not exactly hearing “When I turned 27, everything started to change” objectively, nor do I want to. Sometimes a song arrives at the right moment in your life to hit perfectly.
[10]
Mark Sinker: Not sure if I’ve ever gone on about this here, but a thing I’d love to read or to be directed toward is a deep comparative study of melody within different genres, the shapes and turns and cadences that evoke this milieu, versus the others usual to that one. The key phrase here seems to me highly untypical of the kinds of tuneline you’d expect to find in country, and not just because it’s drenched in big indie echo (plus whispered). What exactly is building up these expectations? I need someone with a YouTube channel and audio examples alongside the staves and dots and sharps and flats – even just an overhead projector and a long pointy stick. They can prove I’m very wrong if they like! (Maybe I am!)
[9]
Ian Mathers: Not really a great sign when the most interest I can muster is in the way the bassline periodically threatens to pivot to full-on “Walk on the Wild Side.” The “deeper well” stuff just isn’t signifying for me, nor the “dark energy” bit. Sure, it sounds like personal growth, and I bet from the inside it means a lot, but it registers as… kinda nothing? There are a couple of floaty bits that are nice, and certainly nothing dips below “pleasantly competent,” but if I could just about squint and see what people were raving about with “High Horse,” my vision isn’t quite as clear here.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Kacey Musgraves makes agreeable music that holds my attention while it’s on. “Deeper Well” has the misfortune to sound like middling Taylor Swift — something from the back half of Speak Now, say. This well is shallow.
[4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: In a few years I will hear this while perusing vegetables at a nice grocery store and hum along pleasantly without being aware of what I’m doing. For now, in my conscious experience, I am utterly unmoved by her studied, philosophical blankness – people didn’t like the last album very much, but at least it had hooks!
[4]
Joshua Lu: In the over ten years since I first listened to Kacey sing about weed, it’s been legalized in my state, I grew old enough to legally purchase it, I reached a point in my life where I wanted to dabble in it (2020 was a time), and I got hooked enough to build up a substantial tolerance. Through all this time, I had her music: rolling joints in “Follow Your Arrow,” letting the grass just grow in “High Time,” having a “Slow Burn.” If she could’ve snuck in a reference to a bong in her Christmas album, I bet she would’ve. To hear Kacey sing about dropping weed thus felt more cataclysmic than anything else she could’ve done. Yes, I was excited by her return to a more standard country sound, even better with that metallic tinge that embellished some of her greatest recent work, but Kacey Musgraves singing about leaving weed behind? Listening to “Deeper Well,” though, it can’t help but feel natural: it was just a thing that she liked once but would rather leave behind, and some things in life are just like that. There’s no judgement or embarrassment, just an acknowledgement of a change in her life, and I appreciate how the song isn’t explicitly about getting wiser or more responsible or any of those things that people assume come with aging. It’s instead framed as a continued discovery of who she is and what’s out there in the world, and the route she took to become the person she is today. Funnily enough, I stopped taking weed this year too. I’m glad I now have a Kacey song for that process as well.
[9]