From Vampire Weekend to Bruce Springsteen to Waxahatchee, I went to some great concerts in 2024. I would say Kacey Musgraves at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn was also a memorable one, if kind of a weird one. First, it was a concert that was long overdue, since after missing out on Kacey’s Golden Hour tour I ended up skipping her Star-Crossed tour due to it coinciding with the peak of the Omicron wave of Covid, despite buying tickets for it. I’m assuming the Deeper Well tour was the same way for many of the people there who had similarly fallen in love with Golden Hour but things had gotten in the way of them seeing those songs live.
Kacey’s performance that night was quite enjoyable, even if she doesn’t exactly write the kind of bangers that get stadiums rockin’. But she made this clear when after doing an impressive levitation act during set-opener “Cardinal”, she addressed the audience about the fact that the election had just punched us in the gut two weeks earlier and pronounced the concert as an opportunity to just vibe and have a communal moment together outside of the noise.
This was about what I was looking for on that night, but unfortunately, the chaos of 2024 came rearing its head when a group of loud, drunk (I’m assuming) young people sat behind us and ruined the vibes, screaming and being obnoxious through the whole set, much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone in our section. One inebriated young woman even had the gall to scream “Let’s fucking go!!!” when Kacey came out onstage like it was friggin’ Knicks game. I assume they were all just looking to have an Eras Tour type of experience that night and in the process completely misread the room. Like many moments from 2024, it made me seriously doubt whether human beings are ok right now.
This reaction also felt so out of place because in a career of making decidedly chill music, Deeper Well might be Kacey’s chillest album yet. I would say this is not always a good thing, since despite many attempts, I just couldn’t quite connect with the album the way I have with pretty much all of her past work. It’s an album that on paper feels like it should be great: after Musgraves’ pop-curious detour Star-Crossed, she returned with a scaled-back album of contemplative folky songs. Yet, most of the songs tend to indistinctly blend together, and while I don’t dislike the production, I think the album’s shortcomings mostly rest on Kacey’s inability to write songs with the same bite and clever insight that her earlier albums possessed.
That said, there are still a few bright spots on Deeper Well that keep it from being a complete misfire. The aforementioned “Cardinal” shows Kacey’s knack for melding country and folk music with pop musings, while the title track also has a kind of simple beauty to it, even if it’s not especially catchy for a lead single. However, there are some fairly cringe-y moments lyrically here, like the mildly tone-deaf “Lonely Millionaire” or “Anime Eyes”, which I would think is a halfway decent song if the nerd factor of its lyrics didn’t leave me so embarrassed. Still, Kacey’s ability to write a simple melody paired with a perfect lyric is more than evident in “The Architect”, a song that sees her reaching for something grander than the mostly insular nature of the album, and considering it was the last song written for the Deeper Well, gives me hope that Kacey has more than enough talent to turn it around on the next album.