It’s been a while since Kacey Musgraves’ most recent album, 2018’s Golden Hour. Over the past couple years, fans have been eagerly anticipating her next record, and now it looks like that could be arriving in the handful of months.
.@KaceyMusgraves appears on the cover of our third-annual Women Shaping the Future issue.
How the queen of ‘galactic country’ is following up a career-defining album (and a divorce) with a little help from Bach, Greek tragedy, and magic mushrooms. https://t.co/IzPYjCBNa0 pic.twitter.com/EXnPGUSC9K
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) February 11, 2021
Musgraves is the subject of a new Rolling Stone profile, and the piece notes Musgraves’ next album “is set to be released this year.” It also says that Musgraves is considering structuring her album like a tragedy, and that when she had that idea, “the album that had seemed fairly nebulous began to take real shape in her mind.”
The feature then concludes with a recounting of a studio session with Musgraves and her collaborators, producers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk. At one point, Musgraves hints at what some of her new music sounds like, saying, “I mean, looking at the list of songs, we have some that venture into, like, a Bill Withers land. We’ve got that synth stuff that we always loved. And we’ve got some Eagles or America territory. There’s a little bit of a dance vibe.” There’s also a conversation about a song called “Star-Crossed” and the musical direction of it, and the piece also shares some lyrics from the tune that reference Musgraves’ divorce from Ruston Kelly:
“Let me set the scene
Two lovers ripped right at the seams
Woke up from the perfect dream
And then the darkness came
Signed the papers yesterday
You came and took your things away
I moved out of the home we made
And gave you back your name.”
The song is then described, “Tashian’s guitar accompaniment had started as a mere flittering of notes, then grew with Latin-inflected drama. Musgraves had sung the words quietly, her voice like a gossamer thread unspooling. The song ended with an outro, the word ‘star-crossed’ repeated until it trailed off, without resolution. At least, that’s how it ended that day; nothing was yet set in stone.” Elsewhere, it’s revealed that Carlos Santana may end up performing on the song.
Check out the full feature here.