Concert Review: Kacey Musgraves' Deeper Well Tour
Happy and sad at the same time.
BALTIMORE - Growing up in the backseat of my mom's used, two-door Chevy Cavalier, a car whose white gave way to a polluted discolor after years of travel, our daylight-savings darkened evenings were filled with the radiowaves of Delilah. I'm sure you know her, the soft-spoken, easy-listening radio host who, for years and years, has hosted her self-titled program taking listener calls, giving advice, and playing gentle music to help and guide the weary traveler. As a youngster, probably because I had seen and met a few local DJs around my town, I thought Delilah, the Giving Tree of nighttime orators, was local herself. Perhaps our version of Pittsburgh's Aunt Ester. It wasn't until just a few years ago that I learned that no, my relationship with Delilah wasn't special, as the Pacific Northwest-based show is syndicated all across the country and listened to by millions and millions of people.
Knowing what I now know, that many young folks listened in to the problems and digressions faced by the longtime listener, first-time callers on the show, I believe Delilah raised generations of children to claim the solemnity of solitude, finding comfort in vulnerability. Though those kids grew up to no longer listen to date and time radio shows, they still look for that voice, that music, and that healing where they can.
I thought a lot about Delilah when I attended the Baltimore leg of Kacey Musgraves' Deeper Well Tour. It's one of the few notes I even bothered to write down, partially because Musgraves puts on a fantastic show that often speaks for itself, but also because that thought kept coming back to me again and again. Musgraves is like Delilah for the Spotify generation, existential yet understanding. The record Deeper Well is an honest and open awareness of life's simplest pleasures and its toughest battles; the concert Deeper Well is a gathering of like-minded folks who believe, as she sings in the eponymous track, "I've gotten older now I know / how to take care of myself / I found a deeper well."
The show begins with Nickel Creek, the string band that formed over three decades ago when all of its members were but children. They're a lively group and well-known in the bluegrass world as the intersection of Alanis lyrics and Quincy grooves. When I grew up to drive that same Chevy Cavalier, I listened to many hours of Chris Thile, the band's mandolist and centerman, on public radio when he hosted A Prairie Home Companion, later retitled as Live from Here. Listening to Thile's quips and quirks, his interjections into songs and his showmanship between them, was like reliving those Sunday morning drives through Appalachia, newly-licensed and able to listen to whatever I wanted to on the radio. They're followed by Lord Huron, an indie rock band whose stuff is just totally not my thing and only inspired me to write down one note: Lord Huron sounds like if Jack Skellington wanted to be in charge of July 4th because he went to see a Killers cover band and ate a meal at the Shady Maple.
The two openers form the bridge that makes up Musgraves' musical sensibilities, the country music that made her famous and the more popular music for which she's become known recently. A lot of people say that Kacey "grew out of country music," but I don't see the genre as something synonymous with immaturity. Instead, as she explained halfway through her set, "There's so much to love there, but there's so much that could change."
That word, change, is at the center of her storytelling and musicianship. Her country roots, represented by early records like Same Trailer Different Park and Pageant Material, have given way to a new genre that more closely identifies her personal growth. Her previous album, star-crossed, a Shakespeare-inspired divorce deconstruction, was a fiery and frankly pissed-off affair. Deeper Well is about finding peace and healing after such difficult things. The album's seventh track, "Dinner with Friends", for instance, sees her singing about those everyday matters that give her solace, "The feeling you feel when you're looking at something you made / The layers and ruffles of my favorite pink champagne cake / My home state of Texas / The sky there, the horses and dogs, but none of their laws." While traversing the grassy knoll center stage barefoot, she comes across as someone grounded and at ease.
But that's not to say that Spacey Kacey is nowhere to be found. The show does start with her levitating above the stage in a pretty neat theatre magic trick, after all. With lyrics like "I wanna bathe in the moonlight / Until I'm fully charged," "Made it through the tears to see a Miyazaki sky / Now it's you and I, and we're flying," and the beginning of the title track where she sings, "My Saturn has returned" charting the course of the album, her music isn't just of the planet we stand on. In the same title song, she sings, "I used to wake and bake / Roll out of bed, hit the gravity bong that I made / And start the day," - "It was a two-liter bottle!" she quipped after that lyric - and when she heads to the B-stage, affectionately called the Saturn Stage because, yes, a giant recreation of Saturn hovers above, you quickly understand why more than a few folks in the crowd did more than just put on their cowboy boots to get ready for the show.
It's that ethereal existence, a pensive approach to personal growth, the longing for understanding, that makes the show, the album (which just received five Grammy nominations - Kacey popped champagne to celebrate), and the artist so reflective. That desire to know more, feel heavier, and find that deeper well, is what makes those people sitting by the radio or driving on and on to nowhere think and think and think. They listen to the singer-songwriter songs or country hymnals, they call into Delilah's show, and they ponder change. That's the music that Kacey Musgraves writes. Well, at least that's what this album is about. After all, she is always changing.