Kacey Musgraves is hardly the first artist to have made the leap from country darling to pop star, but her transformation has seemed like more of a happy accident than a calculated effort. The spacey, discofied touches of 2018’s Golden Hour are natural enough when grafted onto Musgraves’s pretty, emotionally candid songs, which genuinely feel like the result of the singer simply following where her muse (or acid trips) took her.
Musgraves’s follow-up, Star-Crossed, is just as effortlessly melodic and accessible. But it’s also more eclectic, far afield of modern radio tropes, either of the pop or country varieties. The album traces the dissolution of Musgraves’s marriage to fellow Nashville singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, and one might expect a lot of pomp and circumstance from such a self-referential effort. Of course, there’s a bit of that, but Star-Crossed is surprisingly restrained and intimate, as Musgraves keeps even her most ambitious songs short, sweet, and direct.
One of Star-Crossed’s potential singles, “Breadwinner,” is an insightful reflection of modern discourse about society’s shifting gender roles: “He wants your shimmer/To make him feel bigger/Until he starts feeling insecure.” But while songs like “Breadwinner,” “What Doesn’t Kill Me,” and “Justified” bop along amiably enough, the set’s strongest stretch is a run of emotionally bare acoustic ballads. On “Camera Roll,” Musgraves can’t resist the self-inflicted pain of looking at photos from happier times (“Chronological order/And nothing but torture/Scroll too far back, that’s what you get”), while “Hookup Scene” is an affecting tribute to monogamy (“If you’ve got someone to love…Hold on tight/Despite the way they make you mad/‘Cause you might not even know that you don’t have it so bad”).
Even some of the album’s less stripped-down material is arranged in deceptively simple fashion, accentuating styles that suit Musgraves and eschew pop formula, from the new wave bounce of “Simple Times” and “Cherry Blossom” to the psychedelic balladry of “Good Wife.” Musgraves has certainly earned the license to go big, which she does with striking results on the wildly genre-bending title track. The song’s dramatic, layered harmonies make for a sweeping introduction to the album, and the moment when the glitzy “There Is a Light” bursts into a euphoric flurry of jazz flute is fantastically weird.
Star-Crossed closes with an audacious cover of “Gracias a la Vida,” a beloved Spanish-language celebration of life. Of the countless versions of the song released since it was penned and recorded by the late Chilean singer Violeta Parra, none have felt as iconoclastic as this one, with its faux lo-fi intro and vocoder-laden harmonies. It puts a fine point on things: If Musgraves is going to be a pop star, she’s certainly doing it on her own terms.
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