Her last trip to Australia nearly ‘broke’ her, but this music icon is back

When it comes to Australia, country superstar Kacey Musgraves is overdue for a do-over. Her last trip here was a literal washout, with wild weather and flooding cancelling what was to be her headline slot at Splendour in the Grass in July 2022.

“That nearly broke me,” Musgraves recalls. “We made it all the way over and then we literally were there not even 24 hours before I had to turn around and come right back home. It was like 30 hours of travel in a period of 48 hours. I think it might have changed me forever.”

Coming from Musgraves, country music’s ultimate earth child, that’s probably not hyperbole. You get the sense that something as unnatural as a flight (let alone a 30-hour round-trip) must be existential torture for Musgraves. Speaking from her woodsy home in Nashville – dressed in a blue denim shirt and hoop earrings, her blue heeler Pepper by her side – she rushes through answers as though she’d like nothing more than to blitz through her promo obligations and get back to touching grass, or at least her horses.

The wonder of the natural world never seems far from Musgraves’ mind. Before our interview, she’d been out buying goldfish for her pond out back. “We’ll see how they fare against the raccoons in the area,” she says. For her 37th birthday, just a few days later, she’d planned a camping trip with her small group of friends (“freaks and weirdos”, she calls them). “We’re gonna ride horses and make cowboy breakfast outside on the fire, and take the horses down to the river and just camp out under the stars.”

It’s also the focus of Deeper Well, the 2024 album that will make up the bulk of her Australian shows this month. After the acclaimed genre excursions of 2018’s Golden Hour and 2021’s Star-Crossed, Deeper Well found Musgraves in a quieter, contemplative mood. The album was such a sonic and spiritual retreat that it didn’t capture me much until, one day, listening while walking through a rainstorm under the canopies of willow trees in my local park, it suddenly made perfect sense.

“Those songs still feel like a home base to me,” says Musgraves of Deeper Well. “One great thing about getting older is you have less tolerance for fake bullshit and it gets easier to simplify and look out for yourself in ways you aren’t capable of doing when you’re younger, and that’s reflected in those songs.

“I think after experiencing the highs of love on Golden Hour and then the lows of divorce on Star-Crossed” – those albums charted the beginning and end of Musgraves’ relationship with musician Ruston Kelly – “Deeper Well was a very calming and therapeutic journey for me, a sort of reset,” she says. “These songs just feel like Xanax to me, an anti-anxiety blanket.”

Deeper Well was created in what Musgraves has called her “soft nature cottage witch” phase. Even 18 months on, she’s still largely in that space, she says, but ideas for a new album have been fermenting. “I’ve been writing a lot of songs that I love, but I’m trying to not put a ton of pressure on myself, just letting myself take my time with it.”

What kind of sounds or ideas are we talking about? “I’m still kind of figuring it out myself,” says Musgraves, “but there’s been a lot of craving and inspiration to go back to my Texas roots.”

Perhaps a better question about the new work might be, what drugs are inspiring it? Musgraves laughs. “That’s a good question. Um, I guess all of them.”

Drugs have long been a key part of Musgraves’ persona (her Instagram handle remains, famously, @SpaceyKacey). She’s admitted she wrote the Golden Hour track Mother while tripping on LSD, while on Deeper Well’s titular single, she sang about her pothead habits (“I used to wake and bake, roll out of bed, hit the gravity bong that I made”).

In some interviews, she’s shown a reluctance to indulge the stoner persona. Is she sick of journalists prodding her about her drug use? “Um, well, it depends,” says Musgraves. “Like, if you’re gonna put the one thing I said about drugs as your headline – which is what most people try to do because they love clickbait – then obviously that sucks. But everyone has so many different ways of finding inspiration and tapping into their sense of spirituality, you know what I mean?”

A self-described mycophile, last month she even hosted a live conversation with “world-renowned fungi expert” Paul Stamets, titled “The Life Giving Properties of the Magic Mushroom”, where the pair discussed the biology and mental health potential of psilocybin. In her introduction, Musgraves said to Stamets: “You’re my Oprah.”

Had Musgraves heard of Australia’s mushroom killer? “Whatsit?” she says. I suddenly found myself summarising the sordid saga of Erin Patterson to an eight-time Grammy winner. It’s not really drug-related, I add, it’s more just a tale of the dark side of mushrooms.

“That’s pretty insane,” says Musgraves, politely indulging this odd excursion. “That’s a very witchy way to kill someone.”

Considering the conservative countenance of Nashville country, the drug talk has only added to the counter-cultural mystique Musgraves has cultivated since her breakthrough hit, Follow Your Arrow. Released in October 2013, the song, featuring a line supporting the LGBTQ community, was banned by some country radio stations in the US who deemed it anti-Christian. In 2015, Musgraves was at the centre of another country reckoning after a radio consultant described the genre’s female artists as “tomatoes in the salad” – that is, less important than the lettuce of the genre’s male stars.

Musically, Musgraves’ genre-agnostic stance has been another provocation to traditional country. Her Grammy-winning album Golden Hour embraced pop, disco and electronica, while follow-up Star-Crossed closed with a cover of Gracias a la Vida, written by Chilean leftist activist Violeta Parra and popularised by the Indigenous Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa.

If it’s all made Musgraves a sort of figurehead for a more inclusive and open country industry, it’s not without its awkward wrinkles. In mainstream publications, she’s regularly been described as “the country artist for people who don’t like country”, a condescending concession for an artist who’s never circumscribed her country credentials. After more than a decade, does she still feel like an outsider in Nashville?

“It depends on what kind of country you’re listening to, because I think country has found itself split into different sectors,” says Musgraves. “I’ve always just considered myself not really tied to anything in particular; it’s me and my songs and whatever feels inspiring for me to make at the time. I can’t help that some of that comes out sounding very country, but then also these other sounds that I feel inspired to explore.

“All my favourite artists have kind of made up their own genre,” she adds. “Like, the Beatles or the Eagles. You can’t really pinpoint exactly what they are because they’re an amalgamation of so many different things. It’s like, the genre is the Beatles, you know what I mean? That’s how I see music.”

More recently, Musgraves has become an elder stateswoman of sorts to up-and-coming country artists who share her rebellious spirit. I Remember Everything, her 2023 collaboration with Zach Bryan, another country star who refuses to play with the Nashville establishment, won a Grammy, amassed a billion streams and was a fixture on the ARIA singles chart for more than a year. She’s also released singles with Noah Kahan and Madi Diaz and, tellingly, at a time when Trump’s ICE crackdown is attacking the US’s Latin community, she’s jumped on a song by the Mexican norteno singer-songwriter Carin Leon.

“I just find it to be a big compliment when someone asks me to work with them, and ultimately I’m down to collab with anyone as long as the song speaks to me,” says Musgraves. “I’m just a fan of good songs, you know? And it’s a fun way between my own albums to explore and do something different.”

Kacey Musgraves performs at the Sydney Opera House on November 19 and 20, at Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on November 22, and at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on November 26 and 27.