How Kacey Musgraves Made Country-Pop Psychedelic

Mushrooms and LSD played a major part in her best work on the masterful 'Golden Hour' and 'Star-Crossed.'

I have loved Kacey Musgraves since she dared to write a country song exhorting listeners to “make lots of noise, kiss lots of boys, or kiss lots of girls if that’s what you’re into” and to roll a joint when “the straight and narrow gets a little too straight.”

Those homophilic and pro-cannabis lyrics got her exiled from country radio when “Follow Your Arrow” came out in 2013, but maybe that was a blessing in disguise, as Musgraves has gotten far more creatively bold since. She’s also been quite vocal about the way she got there, and the answer is another drug reference country radio might not like: psychedelic trips. LSD helped her to write the songs “Slow Burn” and “Mother” on her much-awarded 2018 album Golden Hour and psilocybin inspired the follow-up, 2021’s Star-Crossed. Both mark a turn in her sound from straightforward country toward incorporating pop, dance, and an unmistakably spaced-out, synth-driven psychedelic sound. As a result, Musgraves has become a great advocate for psychedelics, through her frank, smart interviews and social media posts, as well as through the music itself.

Musgraves spoke openly about her acid and mushroom trips in publicity surrounding Golden Hour, saying the drugs “brought me closer to our planet and to humanity.” The song “Mother” specifically came out of an LSD trip. In an Instagram post, she said it was “The shortest song on the album and maybe the most meaningful. One summer night, surfing waves of LSD and feeling nostalgic for everywhere and everyone all at once, I got a text from my mom. It made me miss her. It made me think about her hands. Hands that carry out the vision her imagination brings to canvas with her beloved paints and brushes. Hands that find treasure in found junk. Hands dirtied by the East Texas soil. Hands that held me.” In no less than The New York Times, she walked through “Slow Burn” and its psychedelic origin (which she coyly calls “a spiritual journey, so to speak,” before clarifying that she was on LSD). She and her producers point out the “spaceship riffs” and Indian-influenced sounds that they experimented with to add a psychedelic tinge to the arrangement.

She explained to Billboard that she’d been using psychedelics for a few years, since her early 20s. “I had profound experiences,” she said. “I feel like it made my music better, it made me miss my family and care more about them and also know my place egotistically in the universe. Like, I’m nothing.” That perspective likely came in handy when Golden Hour became a career-defining success. After earning critical and commercial success, it won Album of the Year at the Grammys and ultimately went platinum, making her a crossover success.

However, her home life frayed in the aftermath. While Golden Hour had dedicated many of its tracks to the joys of falling in love with her husband, songwriter Ruston Kelly, their honeymoon phase had ended. “I felt, in many ways, on top of the world in my career, but in my personal life, I felt like I was dying inside,” she told Elle. “I was crumbling. I was sad. I felt lonely. I felt broken.”

As they divorced in 2020, she faced the prospect of making her next record. Her solution: a seven-hour mushroom trip guided by a doctor friend, complete with the Johns Hopkins University labs’ official playlist. During her trip, she had a vision of herself at 9, the age when she began performing, and came to the conclusion that she had “less time for bullshit”: “I am so repelled by the artificial, the chatter, the pressures of society. It doesn’t matter. We’re not here for very long.”

She described the experience to The Guardian in detail, including her takeaways: “The music was painting this whole story, pulling from childhood memories, experiences, thoughts. I was feeling every pluck of a string in my body, senses start to mix, you feel colors… it’s so hard to explain. The day after, you’re encouraged to journal and re-listen to the playlist, triggering some of the emotions that you felt then. So that’s what I was doing the day after, when the word Star-Crossed popped into my mind as a title, and the concept of a modern tragedy, the acts: the exposition, the climax and the downfall, then the resolution.”

The playlist included a variety of tracks, from The Beatles to Bach to shamanic chants. The tragedy theme, however, sprung specifically from a sad Bach song. On the podcast A Slight Change of Plans with Maya Shankar, she talked about the special ways that psychedelics enhance the act of listening to music: “You feel it in your bones, your cells. It's running through you in a way that I've never experienced before.” (I recommend listening to this conversation, an unusually intelligent discussion on psychedelics with an interviewer who takes the topic seriously, unlike some of the other press interactions Musgraves has had, which often have an “ooh, drugs!” vibe to them.)

The resulting album includes plenty of psychedelic touches, such as vocoder distortions and an aggressive flute solo on “There Is a Light.” Reviews called it “a near therapeutic experience” and “dreamy” (the UK’s Line of Best Fit) and noted its “retro-futurist production” and “spaced-out wistfulness” (The Guardian). The film she made to accompany the album feels pretty psychedelic, too: Musgraves in a wedding dress with crystals adorning her eyebrows, wandering a Southwestern landscape; identical nurses in miniskirts and sunglasses rushing her to an X-ray that reveals a broken heart; a group of Stepford Wives being trained in home arts.

At a time when psychedelics are seeping into the mainstream, Musgraves gives us a glimpse at what modern psychedelic music might sound like. Here’s to hoping that aggressive flute solos become a mainstay.