04.28.23: Notes on Kacey Musgraves

Should Congress ban "divorce albums"?

A few days ago I saw “divorce albums” at the top of the Popcast feed and immediately worked myself up to jump down Caramanica’s throat via text before the app could even start buffering the episode. Don’t worry: I graciously listened and ultimately found his conversation with the country music critic Marissa Moss, about the creative aftermath of power couple divorces in the genre, quite insightful and well worth the listen, and I think the episode title somewhat undersells the scope of the conversation. Jon, Marissa, if you’re reading this, I thank you for your service.

I winced going into the episode, though, because these days, generally speaking, divorce album discourse is unhinged. It’s more or less memespeak at this point, like calling something someone’s such-and-such era. Divorce album discourse rendered the rollout for Adele’s last album, 30, fucking unbearable online. Adele has been singing sad shit since 2010. Did we really need to dust for prints and run the forensics on her divorce in order to “have context,” or whatever, for 30? When Adele is in a healthy relationship should we then proportionately expect her to produce an album of ecstatic sex jams and sappy tributes? What even is this idea that there’s necessarily this sort of strict correlation between the state of someone’s personal life and the tone and focus of their artwork? This idea that break-ups send grown women stumbling into the studio sobbing inconsolably like they’re in a goddamn rom-com? Respectfully: are people 12?

Is constantly indulging this sort of framing the only way some artists can make their music consistently legible to fans and critics? Can’t we read between the lines quietly, with some subtlety and mystique? There’s no dignity in any of this.

This sort of discourse always strikes me as a nakedly crude and reductive way of dehydrating songs into fodder. Taylor Swift and Drake have both done a lot, I think, to train a couple generations of fans to anticipate albums and hear songs as straight-up diary dumps. This sort of willing pop trivialization is fine in moderation and interesting in some forms. Think rap beefs. Think Taylor’s administration of her fandom — a performance in its own right. It just gets to be tiresome when it’s the only idea that artists, critics, or fans are bringing to the table. And “divorce album” tends to be a way of announcing that we’re about to spend a long rollout talking about anything but music.

Kacey Musgraves released her latest album, star-crossed, around the same time as Adele’s 30 and enjoyed a similar reception, though on a smaller scale. Musgraves herself framed star-crossed as a divorce album about her split from the country singer Ruston Kelly a year earlier; she ate some shrooms and wrote some songs and sought “to transform my trauma and my pain into something else.” This framing, I was convinced, is what doomed the musical content of this album to utter trivialization upon release. Critically star-crossed went down as a kinda weird and narrowly underwhelming flex; a self-conscious stoner’s slightly miscalibrated high; a noble failure. At the time I felt rather defensive of star-crossed even as I recognized its faults, as I also recognized a singer’s delightfully careless adventure into kitsch and Soundcloud. It was somewhat thrilling. It was somewhat misguided. These distinctions either way were more interesting than whatever book report we could’ve pre-written about the admittedly prominent themes of separation.

Listen to “good wife,” a song sorely in need of some Maybach Music drops and a climactic feature from Rick Ross. This sounds like nothing on Golden Hour or Same Trailer Different Park. That’s the problem, of course: I reckon the country people wanted to hear Same Trailer, the coastal people wanted to hear Golden Hour, and instead Kacey Musgraves pulled up in the pecan Jag blasting future funk, singing, “Tokyo wasn’t built in a day,” and thus pleasing no one — well, no one but me, and even I now have some caveats. star-crossed really is a bit too blunted, for one: there’s a couple songs on here where Kacey’s voice barely gets any bolder than a whisper, and the production is too similarly mellow to pick up the pace or the slack. At so many points on star-crossed, I’ll perk up in admiration of some moderate weirdness, e.g., the slathering of effects on “good wife” and “there is a light,” and yet find myself wishing she’d gone still a bit harder and darker, really turn if you’re gonna turn, hit the gas and smash the E-Class — because otherwise on star-crossed she struggles to emerge fully re-formed from the echoes of her and her producers’ influences. In the immortal words of Wyclef, “You can either make this song or not make this song.” Seriously! Call Rick Ross! No, better yet, call YoungBoy!

This is all to say that I’m a little less in love with star-crossed, especially after spending a bit more time with Golden Hour as well and falling a bit more in love with that one for its easier, breezier disposition; and yet I still think star-crossed caught a bad beat the first time around and deserves some off-cycle reconsideration, if only to be praised or panned on less tedious terms.

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Next week I’m on Cape Cod. Perhaps I’ll send a couple enigmatically brief newsletter updates at the usual times on Tuesday and Friday, or maybe I’ll just sleep in and see you all a week later — we’ll see. For now I leave you with a song from the only divorce album we herald as such ‘round these parts.