Kacey Musgraves - 2013 Anticipation

this album is fucking great

xgau reviewed it: http://social.entertainment.msn.com/music/blogs/expert-witness-blogpost.aspx?post=fe6e27de-1614-48a4-b055-40db617c61e8

that standard of writing is basically "listened once, initial thoughts that i dumped on ilx"

His country writing is fraught. His last couple: Ashley Monroe: "how rare it is for a major-label Nashville hopeful to put this much care into every song" (nonsense). Pickler: "American Idol haunts this artistic breakthrough, a sense that she'll always sing what she's told no matter how many composition credits she bags" (so what?). The reviews argue that the songs and their performances are triumphs anyway; I question the assumptions that their Nashville and AI backgrounds would make us wary.

this fucking album

"keep it to yourself" is so empathetic (like, she ends up in an unfulfilling booty call two songs later) that it's just ice cold

instagrammy video for "merry go round" is interesting too, b/c that's def a route through which i can see her crossing over

"blowin' smoke" is so well constructed, like the first verse is such a red herring - you think it's going to be about kelly who escapes the small town but no it's about the waitresses who sneered at her but got stuck there forever (but pretty non-judgmental too)

"stupid" is just awesome. STUPID LOVE IS STUPID DON'T KNOW WHY WE ALWAYS DO IT. she's so over everything and i love it

"Step Off" is a perfect little throwaway, quieter than Taylor Swift's "Mean."

apparently "i miss you" lifts the tune from some radiohead song? w/vs she certainly improved it

"Step Off" is a perfect little throwaway, quieter than Taylor Swift's "Mean."

kacey's over-everything attitude comes into its own there, like you really believe that it doesn't affect her even though she's troubled herself to write a whole song about it (whereas taylor - deliberately - gives the game away in the middle eight)

also helps "follow your arrow", like the line about kissing girls isn't there to Make A Point (well it is, but her delivery ensures it's not signposted heavy-handedly), it's there because duhhh

this is my 2nd fav album of the year, anyway

I was driving around DC listening to the local country station when I heard "Blowin' Smoke" for the first time. I had no idea who it was by, but made a note to find out. The next day or so I randomly came across two reviews of Musgraves, so I made a note to buy the album when I got home. Then when I played the album and heard "Blowin' Smoke" I though, huh, that's really how this is supposed to work, right? Hear a song on the radio, read a couple of reviews, get rewarded with a great record.

Playing in London next Monday. Tempted to go. The album is very good.

apparently "i miss you" lifts the tune from some radiohead song? w/vs she certainly improved it

― flamenco drop (lex pretend), Tuesday, April 9, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Man, I don't give much of a shit about Radiohead, but "apparently"?

well i can only remember how about two radiohead songs actually go!

def gonna try to reach on mon

Sounds as much like Radiohead as Radiohead sounds like The Hollies.

Creep sounds a lot like that Hollies song. I noticed it the first time I heard it.

closest radiohead analogue i could think of was "nude" which is ridiculous

seeing her monday :D

but it's a waste of breath and it's a waste of time i know

tremendous album. "Follow Your Arrow" is my least favorite song, though, when it opens it sounds like she's deliberately trying to rewrite "Merry Go Round."

I'm going on Monday too. Excited!

I love the person/first one rhyme.

loving this. 'merry go round' is a little to clever for its own good imo. blowing smoke & i miss you are incredible

<3

Been enjoying this album. In Merry Go 'Round, I first heard the "Mary two doors down" line as "Mary Tudor's down" and thought she might really be reaching with a 16th century reference in there.

this album is great! the opener, "Silver Lining", is killing me: the chorus' melody is the catchiest thing I've heard all year. I love the sound of her voice.

is there any feeling that the album's going to be a hit? it seems pretty low key for that. like it reminds me as a really well crafted take on the alt.country tunes I jammed in the 90s; & we know how that was received by Nashville.

huh, wiki says that "Merry Go Round" has sold 524,000 copies already. if so, whoa! yeah, that's a hit

it debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 (behind the Timberlake juggernaut) xp

shit, yeah, just saw that too, #1 country too. that's great!

love the plunk-plunk sound of the guitar on "Dandelion"

it was cool to see her the other night at the ACM awards, nominated for 'top female vocalist' up against the big marquee names

I've listened to this album like five times in a row now, just got it yesterday but it's gonna be one of those records

Favourite line on this so far (among many) is "Every arrow that I aim is true / but I miss you" - such a great couplet

is a real boy is the besssst, and though they've never equaled it in defense of the genre is at least a fun mess. their last record kinda sucked.

omg that's supposed to be in the fall out boy thread. what is this

I can hear Fall Out Boy doing "Step Off."

well yeah my country tastes tend toward "things that could be transparently covered by crossover emo bands"

pop-punk cover of 'stupid' would be pretty easy to bang out in a coupla hours

Well, I enjoyed that very much. The Weezer cover was a little unexpected!

she does a weezer cover?

Looked for you but didn't see you Tim!

Enjoyed her Mama's Broken Heart too - stripped out Miranda's camp, much more sullen. Final song that she said had never been released was amazing

Great concert! Such a beautiful voice. Not to mention beautiful looks omg I was stunned. BUT THE SETLIST WAS TOO SHORT! No "Dandelion" :( :( It felt like that boring opener guy was on for longer.

Love her so much for "Follow Your Arrow" and how she's championing it as a future single.

Best part = her ridic impressive whistling

Not to sound stalkerish but I totes saw you there lex.

Likewise, the Lex (but you said you mightn't make it so I didn't scour the place). Yeah that encore was tremendous, something to anticipate on the next record I guess...

love short sets! I suppose that's one of the reasons why debuts rule.

Anyone heard her three self released records?

can they still be bought?

i'm jealous of everyone who got to see this show. she's opening on kenny chesney's tour but idk how i feel about going to a giant arena show primarily for an opening act.

the more i think abt it the more "follow your arrow" seems like it is destined to be a live/fan favorite that nonetheless will probably not quite work on the radio. glad she is pushing for it tho. i think "keep it to yourself" would be a gorgeous fall/wintertime radio single.

uberweiss you shoulda said hi! i was going to moot some sort of pub drinks beforehand but i had to be elsewhere and sadly missed the opening guy. thought her set was surprisingly long given the album's only 35mins - only songs she didn't play were "dandelion" and "i miss you" (hmm, the most lovelorn ballads), but she played two older songs and the lambert/weezer covers instead.

voice much less diffident than on record - "keep it to yourself" was kind of revelatory, prob my highlight, totally slanted towards the empathetic side, maybe even the subtext that she herself is thinking the same things (and of course ultimately even more ice cold for it).

this is the only trace of the unreleased encore online - it was sort of weird at the time to hear a song that i knew i might not ever get to hear again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULMDI1uRP88

In Washington, in Idaho
In Oregon and away we go
To Tennessee and Arkansas
No we won't stop 'til we've seen 'em all

vs

Man I'm out in Texas, man, I'm out in A-town
Then I'm up in Chi-town or Miami shuttin' it down
It's that New Orleans, it's LA or The Bay
It's New York, Philly, and the whole DMV
I'm a Detroit Player, man it's North-South Cack
Ohio, Pittsburgh, got St. Louis on deck
It's Delaware, Connecticut, it's New Jersey got hella bricks
It's Queens, Brooklyn, and yeah they wildin'
Bronx, Harlem, and Staten Island

she also didn't play "back on the map"

and yeah the setlist wasn't actually short, just in that i wanted it to go on and on.

"i'm ashamed of bush... don't ruin my career" was lol

and yeah lex i should have! but my friend wanted to stay near the front (slightly awkward considering i was probably the tallest person in the room; people behind me must have loved me) and then i didn't see you after the show

I'm a little disappointed that there are only seven different LP editions.

not her anti-weed anthem! good song tho

I like the text painting with the "I found a deeper well" melody descending and how the chorus transitions into those gentle instrumental passages. Rather understated for a lead (title track) single.

this is great. something about the directness of the lyrics mixed with the intricate, yet conversational melody is giving labi siffre? maybe i'm crazy

understated yet lush, very excited for the album now

Not bad.

To be greeted when I enter one of my favorite bars with "cherry blossom" annoys me.

.@KaceyMusgraves unveils the tracklist for her new album, ‘Deeper Well.’

— Out March 15th. pic.twitter.com/pOXyMhGnyy

— Kacey Musgraves Access (@KaceyAccess) February 8, 2024

this is more promising than the last album's singles for sure

promising, and a reminder that Golden Hour is one of the best-sounding records in recent memory

it doesn't quite sound as good as golden hour (the multi-tracked vocal is a bit much here) but it's close yeah

The multi-tracked vocals on the verse really bothers me. I've seen critics (Caramanica iirc?) call her voice "thin"; I think it's lovely, but this ain't helping.

her voice *is* "thin", that doesn't mean she doesn't use it to good effect tho

'not bad' is my impression of this one. i thought her last album was fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSIGEn11V6E

pleasant enough golden hour-lite

compressor on the vocals a bit aggressive vocal to my ears

but yes, otm

listening to the album it's actually less golden hour light and more a continuation of star-crossed

her songwriting more subtle, refined

more situations, less concepts

some 90s production vibes too, rnb notes

doesn't sound perfect to my ears, but sounds like something I'll be playing a lot

Very pretty, lovely harmonies throughout. I'm a sucker for some finger-picking and harmonies so this right up my alley. Except for the drums; kill all "lo-fi study beats" drums in music pls

On her softer / politer side, with pretty bland and lifeless arrangements, songs rather indistinguishable. Clearly I miss the pop.

this album is just ok. it's generally pretty but kinda uneven and i'm not really sure what it's aiming for with the production. it has a similar bag of effects lying around as golden hour, but it isn't at all deploying them towards golden hour's widescreen wonder and generally feels much smaller in ambition. it's never really bad but it's rarely that good either?

hell yeah folk rock kacey!

This album is fine. It does not really rock at all. I wish she weren't so wistful daydream navel gazey "it's a new day" all the time, but that's the mode she's been in for a while now, I guess. Music for Walking in the Woods.

This album confirms that, really, she just bores me.

Listened to the album a couple of times at work yesterday and it kept my interest a bit more than Star Crossed did, but it still seems way off the brilliance of Golden Hour. I'm not exactly feeling like I'm desperate to go in for another listen.

I seem to be having the same issue with a lot of the albums I was looking forward to this year. Ariana Grande, The Smile, Erika De Casier, Hurray For The Riff Raff, MGMT, Grandaddy and Faye Webster. None of these are terrible albums at all, I just haven't felt engaged with any of them.

I'm bummed to be in agreement with so many people about this album's consistently pleasant but boring vibes. Hearing any one or two of these in isolation could be welcome but as a whole album, it's oddly monochromatic. I'm someone who thought Same Trailer... and Golden Hour were basically perfect (and the Christmas album too, frankly, for what it was). While I'm glad this album doesn't aim for the same strained conceptual framework as star-crossed, that album at least had the intrigue of someone dealing with personal collapse shortly after reaching their artistic and popular peak--it felt like a little more was at stake. Deeper Well on the whole suggests that she has newfound clarity about life but the music + production seems to prioritize politeness over anything that might approximate revelation or freedom.

It's also weirdly humorless. Kacey can be funny, both in previous music and in interviews and online...where is that person in these songs? I laughed when I opened the CD and the centerfold opens to a picture of her wearing an embroidered peasant dress surrounded by geese and the insert image on the fold-out liner notes is of her holding a chicken...at first I thought it was poking fun at the idea of "back to basics" or something, but the more I listen to the album, it seems like a misguided stab at reaching for significance, like..."You know what's really IMPORTANT? Poultry."

The (positive) WaPo review describes it as a "wellness lifestyle record."

Feel free to wince a little upon hearing that Kacey Musgraves is now singing about the holistic benefits of moon bathing and jade bracelets, but please know that unlike other recent pop albums that dabble in wellness woo-woo — Lorde’s “Solar Power,” FKA twigs’s “Caprisongs” — the singer’s new record, “Deeper Well,” totally gets away with it. Why? Because Musgraves is a country star who ultimately believes in Willie Nelson more than astrology, tarot or Goop. She knows that the greatest country songs ever written aim to provide tidy answers to the thorniest questions of existence. Lucky for those of us who think of wellness lifestyles as spiritual make-believe for people with money, those are still the kinds of songs Musgraves wants to write.

(Technically he calls it a "wellness lifestyle album," but same trailer.)

it's a nice little album, but the plaintive directness i admired about the song "deeper well" is an exception among the tracks here, most of which struggle to rise beyond lyrically mundane. it helps that "deeper well" has one of her most classically gorgeous melodies, the others seem to go in one ear and out the other.

Better than where most lifestyle brands would have those melodies go.

I really wanted to play the contrarian in this thread. A mostly acoustic, chill album that doesn’t really have any big singles actually sounds perfectly up my album. And on first listen I was really taken with it. But after a week of many listens I’ve more or less landed where many of you have. It’s a fine record, just ok. I agree that it’s lacking a lyrical sharpness that is really required when musically it’s so unchanging (and maybe four songs too many at that).

Perfectly up my *alley*