Kacey Musgraves celebrates self-care at 'Deeper Well' album concert at Nashville's Ryman

Kacey Musgraves is two relationships and three album cycles removed from crossing over a significant threshold and entering the next phase of her life.

Her sixth album, "Deeper Well," celebrates these life milestones. The record arrived via a deluge of press appearances and a Friday evening album release concert at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.

It was the type of show where Musgraves performed heartstring-tugging ballads for the first time in concert, without having lived with them in her head, in multiple dress rehearsals, on a tour bus and being able to calculate a show around how her fans were emotionally receiving them.

Thus, the concert arrived as a series of revelations that, two songs in, found Musgraves bawling on stage because she was both revealing raw truths and having earnest revelations in front of her family, friends and therapist — this, while onstage at a 2,400-person concert at country music's Mother Church.

An hour later, she was barefoot, drinking shots of Clase Azul tequila, as the sound of a steel guitar and banjo accompanied the playing of folk songs.

The event highlighted the difference between the euphoria of a pop star's crowd merely seeing their favorite icon and the euphoria they feel when they know every word of their favorite icon's songs.

For Musgraves, relying on herself more than her music to sell herself is probably a notion she's sparingly considered since being half of the locally touring western swing act Texas Two Bits 25 years ago.

However, true to the album's title, "[shes] found a deeper well" and soldiered through.

Some background

Over the past seven years, Musgraves has achieved greater commercial and critical success than ever while also divorcing herself from breadwinning men and genre delineations in equal measure.

A divorce and subsequent breakup occurring amid the writing and release of 42 well-written songs that shimmer and shape-shift between being tethered to their creator and commercial music industry delineations — but still resonated powerfully with fans — is notable.

It makes Musgraves an artist and person who is ultimately unique.

It is also important to note that she achieved the psychological realization that hitting a false bottom and rock bottom is ultimately part of the same emotional cycle. This notion was clearly becoming apparent to her as she sat down with her regular collaborators Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian in the shadow of Greenwich Village at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios to begin writing the album she performed, track-by-track on Friday evening.

Thus, it's an album that tugs at her creative reserves moreso than sees her boldly daring to imbue disco, pop, R&B, rock and LSD into her artistic process.

Album opener "Cardinal" hits with a depth of groove and lyric smacks of peak-era Fleetwood Mac. Again, "The Architect," like "Biscuits" and "Follow Your Arrow" -- other songs Musgraves has worked on with Shane McAnally -- are best delivered as Dolly Parton breakout-era folk-meets-pop country offerings. The album's title track and "Too Good to Be True" are clear premiere album tracks given their earmarkings of lyricism, musicianship and working within a comfortably, nearing three-decade-long tradition of alternative rock, Americana and country singer-songwriting.

Songs defining Musgraves beyond "who" and "what" she is (or isn't)

For Musgraves, the song reigns more supreme than ever.

A process has occurred in her career where her "Pageant Material" good looks and adoration of fashion and hyper-stylizing haven't faded as much as they're not as prominent as contextualizing the strength of the songs and the feelings they inspire in selling "Deeper Well."

For the first decade of Musgraves' mainstream career, her musical catalog spoke accurately and deeply, almost solely about who she was and what she was doing. Moreover, because of the increased political and social tension surrounding the climate in which her music was released, those assertive songs were weaponized into potent weaponry to fight off cis-gendered male aggression and country music label and radio executives in equal measure.

"Deeper Well" represents the first time, with great depth, that other information — expressly how, when, where, and why she and her music exist — is answered with significant scope. Also, she's in a season of healing that doubles as one where the political and social tensions that defined her music are no longer antagonized or rigid. As she noted, her songs can now exist as a space for relaxation on a metaphorical "collection of heartstrings."

The next chapter of Musgraves' career defined

One notion that became apparent as the evening wore on at The Ryman is that songs are graceful and strong structures. The generationally great artist can exist long enough to have careers in which both sides of that work — delicate and robust — are equally renowned.

Kacey Musgraves is a decade into being great. However, when songs like "Dinner with Friends" and "Lonely Millionaire" are played, the second half of her career, where emotionally and sonically dynamic work exists, begins to take shape.

"Dinner with Friends" finds her in an intentional conversation with the late screenwriter Nora Ephron's 2010 novel "I Remember Nothing," a candid and opinionated series of essays that includes a list of mundane and profound things that she liked and disliked about life.

'Lonely Millionaire" is her career's most direct and stereotypically soulful track. Live, it sounds more fully composed than most folk-turned-R&B songs do. Traditionally, studio click-tracks or sampled drum loops occupy the break-beats, which opens the artist impressionistically but limits the art to a breadth of scope that merely includes a series of hip-hop sound-alikes and the origin story of the drums themselves.

Crafting a song about men more defined by their money than their souls but having it land with sounds that trap them in an urbanity of their wealth that denies the freedom of their heart's desires is profound.

Both songs offer glimpses of exciting and lucrative artistic paths.

Noah Kahan, Bob Marley and Musgraves' legacy taking shape

Yes, Noah Kahan walked out and performed his "Stick Season" album duet "She Calls Me Back" with Musgraves as an encore. It was met with an absentminded realization and jubilant scream that aligns very much with how Musgraves has championed artists like his and Zach Bryan's post-COVID-19 quarantine era success.

Kahan's emergence can now be directly tied to how well — even at the risk of significant mental anguish — Musgraves assumed all of the doubt, fear, and guilt about crafting mainstream peak-era art that thumbed its nose at perceived tired conventionality.

Where, then, does that leave Musgraves?

She finished the evening by performing her recent "Bob Marley: One Love" film soundtrack cover of the reggae icon's "Three Little Birds."

Notable about "Three Little Birds" is that it's on "Legend," the 40-year-old greatest hits compilation of Marley's career classics. It has been re-released four times, spent 16 consecutive years on Billboard's Hot 200 albums chart and sold 25 million albums worldwide.

The performance of the cover highlights how Musgraves' career is finally on an arc towards achieving even the barest fraction of that level of astounding success.

Every little thing is finally alright.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Kacey Musgraves celebrates self-care at 'Deeper Well' album concert at Nashville's Ryman