Actually, she did say fuckin’ yee. Kacey Musgraves has announced her fifth studio album, Deeper Well (out March 15), to grow and open our minds. Lead single “Deeper Well†was paired with the announcement, which finds Musgraves reflecting on her life’s changes and priorities after the age of 27 — marked by the cosmos as Saturn’s return. “Took a long time but I learned there’s two kinds of people, one is a giver and one’s always trying to take all they can take,†she sings with a folksy twang and guitar. “So, I’m saying goodbye to the people that I feel are real good at wasting my time.†(This is a much more pleasant Saturn’s return outcome than Donna Meagle’s, who was banned from every riverboat in Germany.) Musgraves challenges you to throw out your “gravity bong,†sit under a tree, and listen to it while the clouds roll by.
Musgraves absconded from Nashville to New York City to record most of Deeper Well, with the history of Greenwich Village serving as a main source of inspiration. “I wanted to just be around some other kind of energy,†she told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1. “I wasn’t putting too much pressure on myself to just, Oh, we have to write an album. I just was like, Let’s go up there and just see what starts falling out.†If Golden Hour was a blissful marriage record and star-crossed was a motivational ode to divorce, Deeper Well will reveal Musgraves’s studies on self-discovery and empowerment. “I think I was craving a bit of some softer songs,†she added. “I didn’t even know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to get back to that organic wooden-instrument place and just no punches pulled.†If you keep digging, well, you might find something deeper to love about yourself.