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(Polydor)The country crossover star’s sixth album opens with a spectacular one-two of the most beautiful songs you’ll hear all year – but the loved-up mood and back-to-nature wonder becomes tweeKacey Musgraves has put the bong down. “I used to wake and bake,” croons the country crossover star on her sixth album’s transcendentally gorgeous title track. “Everything I did seemed better when I was high, I don’t know why.” The 35-year-old’s erstwhile weed habit won’t come as a huge surprise to fans: she claimed her 2018 album Golden Hour was partly written under the influence of LSD, while its follow-up Star-Crossed took shape after a guided psilocybin mushroom trip. Yet on Deeper Well – an album teeming with 60s folk energy and a sense of crunchy, tree-hugging wonder – Musgraves still sounds like she’s tripping. Her drug of choice this time round? Love: new, true and self.Musgraves, as you may have surmised, is not your run-of-the-mill country singer, and hasn’t been for some time. A rare example of a Nashville stalwart who achieved recognition this side of the Atlantic, she became a breakout star in the 2010s, famous for her spiky portraits of small-town life and vocal support for the LGBTQ+ community. On Golden Hour, an extended love letter to her then husband, she incorporated electropop and disco into her palette, winning the Grammy for album of the year. Star-Crossed, inspired by her subsequent divorce, was a restrained and, for some, anticlimactic sequel, yet it cemented her standing as a mainstream artist able to thrive outside her original country context while retaining the genre’s sonic markers – a trajectory not dissimilar to pop overlord Taylor Swift’s. Continue reading...