Nature and Naturalism in Kacey Musgraves' New Album, Deeper Well (and Beyond)
In the years after I graduated college (2013), two artists brought me delicately into communities that I’d never lived in and never would. On the one hand, Kacey Musgraves’ early work brought me into contact with the routine, joy, and heartbroken dust of the world’s trailer parks. On the other hand, Kendrick Lamar’s early run of masterpieces embedded me in the violence, ecstasy, and overcoming of a childhood lived during Clinton and Bush’s war on drugs.
Both Kacey and Kendrick are now about 35 years old, and both have taken a similar pivot in the content of their work toward nature and health.
In 2022, on his polarizing album release, Mr. Morale, Kendrick Lamar, confessed that:
Where's my faith? Told you I was Christian, but just not today/
I transformed, prayin' to the trees, God is taking shape
For an artist whose major breakout masterpiece (good kid, m.a.a.d. city) is essentially an unfolding baptism metaphor for finding God amongst the violence of mid-90s Compton, CA, this pivot away from God and toward a kind of religious naturalism shouldn’t be understated. Later, at the emotional climax of that same album, Kendrick sings:
Water watchin', live my life in nature, only thing relieves me/
Spirit guide whisper in my ear, tell me that she sees me
The thesis, it should be said, of Mr. Morale is basically that mental health is important, especially for Black men, and that there is nothing cool about burying one’s emotions in “chains and tattoos.” One year later, in his single, “The Hillbillies,” Kendrick opens by saying that:
I don't buy much, I buy land, bro/
Cologne, Germany
A few days ago, Kacey Musgraves released her new album, Deeper Well. I’m not here to adjudicate whether the album is good or not. Given how much it meant to me at the time, I’ll always prefer Kacey’s early work. But that is neither here nor there. What is here is that her new album is essentially an ode to spiritual naturalism.
Spiritual naturalism is basically a philosophical perspective that combines a naturalistic understanding of the universe—that is, an understanding based solely on natural laws and forces, without supernatural elements—with a sense of spirituality or profound connectedness to the natural world. It finds spiritual meaning in the intricacies and wonders of the natural universe, embracing concepts such as awe, gratitude, and interconnectedness, all grounded within the framework of scientific understanding. Spiritual naturalists often seek to cultivate a deep appreciation for the beauty and complexity of life and the universe, deriving ethical and existential insights from this appreciation without relying on supernatural explanations.
In some sense, this strand is nothing new for Kacey. In 2020, she released a version of her song “Oh, What A World” as an Earth Day fundraiser, singing:
Oh, what a world, I don't wanna leave
There's all kinds of magic, it's hard to believe
Oh, what a world, I don't wanna leave
There's all kinds of magic, it's hard to believeNorthern lights in our skies
Plants that grow and open your mind
Things that swim with a neon glow
How we all got here, nobody knows
People often mistake Kacey for cosmic when she is really earthy. And her new album is the earthiest yet. The album opens with her asking a cardinal, “Are you just watching and waiting for spring? Or do you have some kind of magic to bring?”
The opening lines of “Too Good To Be True” (a call back to the “Oh, What A World” lyric, “Thank God it's not too good to be true) settle us into a “cloudy morning” with “summer gone” and a “tidal wave” coming. In the track “Moving Out” reflecting on the pain of moving out of a house as refracted through “that big tree in the front yard” and “Plantin' roses all around/Leavin' it better than we found it” and having to move out because “autumn's movin' in.”
The song “Heart of the Woods” is basically a naturalist moral ode to the work of mycologists and tree researchers like Suzanne Simard and their work on fungal and rhizome communication in forests and how, if trees take care of one another, we need to do the same.
Under the ground, there's a neighborhood that can't be seen
Communicating through the roots of the trees
And up in the trees, there are voices that are echoing
A million different languages, songs we singIt's in our nature to look out for each other
In the heart of the woods,
When there is danger, we'll take care of each other.
In “Jade Green,” Kacey goes cosmic crystal, saying, “I wanna bathe in the moonlight/Until I'm fully charged/Come into my power/And heal the broken parts.” She then offers a deistic masterpiece, “The Architect.”
I love this song. In it, she is talking to a kind of pantheistic or deistic god-figure. This kind of god is reflected in the work of Baruch Spinoza, who argued that God and Nature (which he referred to as "Deus sive Natura," meaning "God or Nature") are one and the same. In this view, God does not exist as a separate entity from the universe but is identical to it. Everything that exists is a manifestation of this single substance. This perspective diverges from deism, which typically posits a creator who, while not intervening in the universe, is distinct from it. In this song, Kacey is somewhere in between, looking for an explanation for her wonder.
It is this God, not the Christian one, that is referred to as authorizing the Declaration of Independence. Have you ever read the opening lines? For real, it is not the Christian God that Kendrick is beginning to leave behind but the “laws of nature” and “Nature’s God” that justify the succession:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
This inflection of feeling is admittedly what is behind the title of this blog, All This Life Here. What feels odd is that I’m currently going through a similar reformation of feeling and thought as Kacey and Kendrick. It manifests in me as a kind of return to science and a departure from the world of ideas and ideals. I’ve been compelled by the scientific method and statistics in a way that I haven’t since my junior year of college, when I went through a very real existential crisis of worldview away from all this kind of materialism.
What I cannot seem to separate in my head is if these inflections are a property of something changing in the world that Kacey, Kendrick, and I are reacting to, or if they are a function of being thirty-something. I say this because a return to the real world has a kind of conservative nature to it. It is, in a sense, eschewing the promise and utopianism of early adulthood. For both Kendrick and Kacey, the content of their music has shifted from political to personal. For me, I am fully aware that a detachment from the hyper-progressive forms of sociology and reattachment to a kind of material and scientific study, especially as a white male, will be seen as a kind of conservative or privileged move.
What I’m compelled by in this moment in collective history—2024—and in personal history—32—is making the scientific study of society sacred again (methodological naturalism). Further, I’m hopeful that these studies will be attached to a material reality. I’ve taken Kendrick’s advice to get rid of my nice iPhones and social media. I’m still there, but not really. I’m really here. I’ve taken Kacey’s advice to try my best to pursue the sacred in the everyday, really here.