How Kacey Musgraves opened herself back up to love
NEW YORK — Kacey Musgraves pulls her iPhone from the pocket of her black puffer vest and starts tapping her way to a recent exchange with a friend.
"We were literally just talking about this last night," she says. "Hold on — I want to see how I phrased it."
The 35-year-old country star is an enthusiastic user of Apple's audio message feature, which she says offers two advantages over regular texting: "less time staring at a god— screen," as she puts it, and the valuable emotional data contained in a person's voice. "I can read a note from someone and think they're mad at me," she says. "But then I'll hear it, and I'm like, Oh, they're not!"
Musgraves finds the previous evening's monologue and zeroes in on a section where she's musing about how "there's so much encoded in us from childhood — past trauma, past experiences — and all that goes into falling in love with someone." She looks up and sighs. "It honestly freaks me out to think about just how much of chemistry with another person is beyond our control."
The precarity of romance is on Musgraves' mind because … well, really, the idea is never," which documented her whirlwind marriage to a fellow Nashville, Tennessee-based singer-songwriter, . Blissed-out yet laced with a stoner-ish melancholy, "Golden Hour" won the coveted album of the year prize at the Grammy Awards, vaulting Musgraves from insider-y critics' darling to pop-crossover fashion plate; three years later, she followed it up with "," which presented the tale of her and Kelly's divorce as a Shakespearean tragedy.
