Fifth album. Mid thirties. Arrived, established, dedicated, Kacey Musgraves is tormented by the question of what comes next. Doubts, disillusionments, hopes, it is more than ever permeable to the state of the world. What to do ? Growing your star in a pot? Playing global in Taylor Swift’s flowerbeds? The record doesn’t offer an answer: Kacey digs, goes deeper. In Cardinal, the opening song, half Byrds half Fleetwood Mac, it feels like a flower child at the beginning of a new era. In the title song, lulled by a delicate picking guitar on a groove from bass to Walk on the Wild Side, she invents an urban country-folk style: that’s possible, when we recorded everything in Jimi Hendrix’s old studio, a vestige of hippie New York. Magical place? Safe Haven ? The whole album is thus a proposal for a truce in the midst of chaos, an attempt to bathe the ambient unease in the beauty of the melodies and arrangements. A rose in the barrel, in 2024, is that enough? Kacey gives it a try. Let’s follow her.
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