star-crossed

There is no great betrayal on star-crossed; no bloodletting; no revenge. While Kacey Musgraves’ fourth album intends to guide you from the early stages of a marriage through the aftermath of a divorce, the East Texas songwriter barely mentions the other person at the heart of her story, and her narrator doesn’t seem all that surprised when things start heading south. The 15-track record is billed as a “tragedy in three parts”—inspired by Shakespeare and a pivotal experience on psychedelic mushrooms, paired with an expensive-looking film and the most elaborate production of her career—but Musgraves takes great pains to ground the songs in reality, where things happen subtly, quietly, and without poetry. “If this was a movie, love would be enough,” she sings. “But it’s not a movie.”

Like so much of her best work—the clever, tragic turns of phrase in “Space Cowboy,” the double portrait of a proud outcast and her tight-knit community on 2013’s Same Trailer Different Park—Musgraves’ latest album offers something of a bait and switch. In country music, breakups are discussed with the severity of mass extinction events: When life goes on after love, it is haunted, tortured, joyless. And when it doesn’t, dirty laundry is aired in public, bodies torched and disappeared. Musgraves, who filed for divorce in the summer of 2020, is aware of the gravity of her subject matter: “I wasn’t going to be a real country artist without at least one divorce under my belt,” she joked, and star-crossed arrives to both the highest expectations of her career and a storied lineage in the genre.

Matters are complicated further by Musgraves’ previous album, 2018’s radiant, Grammy-winning Golden Hour, a pop breakthrough inspired by the glow of a happy relationship. The best thing that new love offered Musgraves in those songs was perspective—a vantage from which she could muse with newfound wisdom on her family, her future, and her past. Take “High Horse,” where the joyful momentum of a disco beat led her to realize that even her worst ex wasn’t just something awful that happened to her—he was a type of person, an experience she was never alone in enduring. “Everyone knows someone who kills the buzz every time they open up their mouth,” she sang with bravado, speaking for multitudes.

On star-crossed, Musgraves stands by herself, taking no comfort in this type of insight. This album’s “Breadwinner” feels like a dark counterpart to “High Horse,” with a muted dance beat that plays like steady rain from a gray sky. “I wish somebody would have told me the truth/Say he’s never gonna know what to do/With a woman like you,” she sings in the chorus, isolated and full of doubt. If being in love made Musgraves feel connected to the world, these songs find her burrowing inward, questioning everything. Accordingly, the tragedy unfolding on the album is not that of a good relationship turning bad; it is of a once-confident person losing touch with the things that made her feel complete, worried that life might never be so simple again.

To communicate this anxious frame of mind, Musgraves sings plainly using stark, simple language—the way you speak when you’re desperate to be understood, seeking immediate answers. The songwriter who, on her breakthrough single, spun a million little puns out of the phrase “merry-go-round” now leans toward choruses that could be stitched onto throw pillows: “God help me be a good wife,” she sings through a fog of Auto-Tune. Sequenced early in the album, the song is meant to represent the humble beginnings of a marriage, but its lyrics suggest that, even back then, she felt forced into a role she wasn’t particularly suited for, bracing herself for failure.

Albums like Golden Hour seem to flow unburdened and inspired: little worlds that invite you inside to explore. To both its benefit and detriment, star-crossed is not one of those albums. Its seams show at every moment, in ways that feel artful—spoken interludes, thematic callbacks, a disorienting cover of Violeta Parra’s eternal “Gracias a la Vida” that shifts between settings like the grand finale of an Oscar-bait drama—and others that feel forced. “I’ve been to hell and back/Golden hour faded black,” Musgraves sings in “What Doesn’t Kill Me,” an attempted fight song that feels slightly redundant between the softer revelations of “Keep Lookin’ Up” and the more euphoric ones in “There Is a Light.”

“Healing doesn’t happen in a straight line,” Musgraves observes in “Justified,” and the album falters when you sense her searching for a clean narrative, struggling to place her thoughts in order. The film accompaniment, directed by Bardia Zeinali, hits a similar roadblock, setting itself up to address societal concerns—see Musgraves and friends armed with medieval weaponry, assaulting a bridal shop and declaring themselves “anti-matrimonials”—but finding its most effective visualization with Musgraves alone in her car, singing along to the music. Ballads like “Angel” and “Camera Roll” mirror these tender moments of introspection, returning to the folksy atmosphere of her previous work as she finds her footing in the more complicated present.

Sometimes, the facts of Musgraves’ public life lend themselves to a breakup album that only she could have written. In “Easier Said,” which seems to be about a songwriter witnessing the anticlimactic end to the relationship that inspired her most popular material, Musgraves searches for a punchline in her trajectory. It is her favorite type of subject—happy and sad at the same time—as a reverb-heavy swirl of banjo, pedal steel, and synth offers its own perspective on her evolution. The film captures this surreal, self-referential tone by occasionally following actors back to their trailers on set, where they watch the final scene of Romeo and Juliet (“That’s a shame,” actress Diane Venora reacts, pouting) and help Musgraves through her many costume changes.

These winks at the camera are reminders that Musgraves has always seen herself as an outsider, using her fierce independence to shine through a corrupt, heartbreaking world. This quality, as she remembers in the album’s brightest moments, is the spark that has sustained her unlikely ascent to pop stardom. There is a particular irony in Musgraves’ saddest, messiest album being the one she delivers to her largest audience yet, working with a wide team of collaborators to amplify its obsessive self-reflection into something befitting mainstream reception. This tension provides star-crossed with alternating tones of vulnerability and triumph, as she pieces together a story whose ending we already see coming. “And the truth is,” Musgraves admits early in the record, “I could probably make it on my own.” She can, and she will.

Buy: Rough Trade

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