Photograph: Publicity imageīut if there’s a reason for Breadwinner to stick out, it’s for the satisfying precision of the songwriting on a record that often blunts Musgraves’ usually acute pen.
Tellingly, she was in two minds about putting it on the album in case its seductive defiance warped the overall emotional picture. But she tempers an obvious post-divorce anthem by sounding weary, never triumphant, keeping the production understated. It’s perfect country songwriting, lines tightly nestled as Russian dolls: “He wants a breadwinner / He wants your dinner / Until he ain’t hungry any more,” Musgraves sings over flickering funk reminiscent of early Phoenix. There’s a vacant beat in the chorus where a conventional pop star might have yelped “hey!” This phantom pop punctuation emphasises the gut-punch: there’s no celebration in defiance to be had here.īreadwinner is equally withholding. She longs for the simplicity of teenage life, filled with lipgloss and ragers, and the song echoes the coffeehouse acoustics of her Y2K-era adolescence. It’s followed by Simple Times, its inverse, Musgraves sounding dejected as she admits “being grown up kinda sucks”. “I’m your cherry blossom baby, don’t let me blow away,” she sings on the beautifully evanescent Cherry Blossom, where happiness is tinged with darkness, a Musgraves signature. If there’s a fresh direction here, it’s to more straightforwardly poppy songs that make a virtue of Musgraves’ sweet melodic tendencies. The equanimous Easier Said has some of Frank Ocean’s knack for making spaced-out wistfulness feel intimate: Musgraves admits that she’s “never been afraid to shine” yet felt lost in her marriage occasional rounded plucks of banjo bubble up, like a lump in the throat that she’s trying to suppress. “I just wanna be a good wife!” she cries, piercing and spliced by Auto-Tune, as if she were confessing this fact into a bathroom mirror and letting the shock of it ring in her ears. Good Wife finds Musgraves ill-suited to the role of its title (or is the problem the needy man she realises she married?), and its ambitious arrangement strafes against it: she embraces vintage soul that ticks and bristles, sending distorted synth lines searching amid dreamy atmospherics.
#STARS AND STRIFE MOVIE FREE#
Star-Crossed reckons again with idealism – the perfect spouse, the loved-up selfie – but this time Musgraves claims little vindication at defying those roles more a sense of disappointment at not being able to live up to them, despite how they diminished her natural confidence, followed by one of relief at being free to dream bigger again. There was a sense of victory to it, especially when she also transcended the small-minded country mainstream that shunned her and became a proper star. As a songwriter, the 33-year-old small-town Texan made her name by challenging traditional southern mores about fallen women, using her sly wit to defend burnouts, queer kids and refuseniks.
On Golden Hour, Musgraves basked in newlywed life with fellow country musician Ruston Kelly three years later, they’re divorced. But all this pageantry feels inversely proportional to the bruised peach of an album that Musgraves cradles here. Musgraves won the Grammy for album of the year with her last record, 2018’s Golden Hour, which refracted tender country songwriting through wide-eyed psychedelia and prompted speculation about her pop-star potential. This level of pop infrastructure makes partial sense. There is also an accompanying film starring Eugene Levy and Princess Nokia. She graced glossy magazine covers before she had released any music, promising an album conceptualised around Greek tragedy, after a revelation that arrived while she listened to Bach.
E verything about the run-up to Star-Crossed, Kacey Musgraves’ fifth album, suggested high drama.
0 kommentar(er)
