Kacey Musgraves shares a glimpse into her as-yet-untitled fifth studio album on a new episode of the A Slight Change of Plans podcast, in which cognitive scientist and host Dr. Maya Shankar explores how life change shapes peoples’ minds.
In Musgraves’ case, one of those changes was the perspective shift she encountered via a psychedelic mushrooms trip she took while writing the album. Another was her divorce from fellow artist Ruston Kelly, which she announced in July 2020, ending a two-year marriage whose love story famously inspired Musgraves’ critically acclaimed, Grammy-winning album, Golden Hour.
During her appearance on the podcast, the singer sings a few lines of two different songs, the first of which — “Camera Roll” — was inspired by some ill-advised late-night scrolling through photos on her phone that she wasn’t yet ready to delete.
“Don’t go through your camera roll / So much you don’t know that you’ve forgotten / What a trip / The way you can flip / Through all the good parts of it / I shouldn’t have done it,” Musgraves sings. “Chronological order and nothing but torture / Scroll too far back, that’s what you get / I don’t wanna see him, but I can’t delete him / It just doesn’t feel right yet / Not yet…”
She remembers breaking out into “the ugly kind of little kid cry” while writing the song, confronted by all the painful memories of the good times in her marriage. Laying her emotions bare in a song doesn’t always come easily to her, the singer points out, but this album is full of vulnerable moments.
“That one was really hard. There’s a bunch on there — they’re pretty raw,” Musgraves admits. “I’m sharing a lot about my inner feelings, and that’s not always easy for me.”
While Golden Hour was also an intensely personal project, Musgraves says, it was about a time in her life that was happy: The songs chronicled her love story with Kelly, and the joy she felt during that time. This time around, the singer’s choosing to be vulnerable about a time in her life that was often painful and negative.
“Man, I think my whole life, I’m the older sister, the performer, and I think being that strong, kind of unfazed person was just kind of a go-to for me,” she admits. “And I realize now as I get older that that’s the least strong thing that you can do…
“There was a period where I was like, ‘I am crumbling inside,'” Musgraves continues. “‘I’m not worthy of love. I suck at it. I’ll never, I don’t wanna get attached to anybody ever again.’ I felt really burned by it, you know what I mean? And so I have to remind myself that those feelings are even more relatable to people than this fuzzy, blissed-out, dopamine love album. That’s more of a rarity to feel, sadly, than the other. So I think it’ll be even more relatable to people.”
At the end of the podcast, she sings a snippet of another song from the album, called “If I Was An Angel.”
“If I was an angel, I’d never have to change / I’d never have to change / But something’s gotta change,” she sings.
Musgraves sees a connection between Golden Hour and her new project, and the more comfortable she’s become with sharing a more difficult chapter of her life, the more she sees the two projects as different aspects of the same story.
“One thing that’s interesting to me is — what comes after golden hour? Nighttime. And so, like, I’m in a nighttime period,” she points out. “What’s cool about that is there will be light again.”
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