Kacey Musgraves Brings Bittersweetness and Balm to a Commanding Forum Show: Concert Review

Serenity and arena-rock are two great tastes that don’t really go great together, for the most part. And so, even if you came away admiring Kacey Musgraves‘ latest album, “Deeper Well,” which came out this past March, you might have had some reasonable questions about whether its tranquil qualities were really apt as the crucial basis of an international tour in 15,000-seaters. This is not her first time doing arenas, and it’s not as if Musgraves’ last couple of albums were banger-based, either. But “Deeper Well,” excellent as it is, was so meditative that it felt like it might really be testing the mass audience’s willingness to think: Let’s go be tranquil… en masse.

So here’s to having possibly underestimated the Cult of Kacey. (Being a charter member, I should know better.) Headlining the first of two nights at the Kia Forum going into the weekend, Musgraves played to a full house in Inglewood but, more importantly, to a house that valued being on her wavelength because there’s no one else in pop creating this exact waveform. For the hour-and-a-half length of her set, the singer could make you believe you were part of a nation that believed in peace, love, understanding, tolerance, a little bit of snark, cheerful agnosticism, saying goodbye to toxicity and hello to self-care, individually and collectively. It was a mellow-ass good time.

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The Deeper Well tour starts out with its only special effect: At the end of “Cardinal,” the opening number, Musgraves climbs to the top of a semicircular globe that protrudes all night from the rear of the stage, lies down on it and proceed to levitate, limbs dangling. It’s probably a fairly simple magicians’ trick, but an effective one on a night otherwise unreliant on razzle-dazzle or gimmicks, sending the message that floating will be an appropriate response to the evening’s music. (Presumably she is not suggesting to the audience that we should respond to current events by drifting gentle into that good night, even if the song is about the sensation of getting otherworldly signs from someone who has entered the afterlife.)

From there, Musgraves kept her feet on the ground — her bare feet, as the singer went without shoes all night, in the tradition of Linda Ronstadt. She’s like Ronstadt, as a presence, in some other ways… like the fact that she projects an undeniable glamour but sometimes interrupts that visage by blurting out blunt, even profanity-filled statements, whether it’s about what’s happening (or not happening) in her in-ears or the state of the world. The mood remains meditative, but in a folky, not new-agey sense — her newest songs have as much self-doubt as self-affirmation, and definitely more acoustic instruments than synths. She’s great at conveying a sense of therapeutic calm that doesn’t feel completely worked through yet, that’s a little rough around the edges in spirit, even if her crystalline voice remains free of even the hint of rasp.

The third song of the night was “Sway,” which the packs of young women dotting the crowd took as a command even for numbers that held no such suggestion. The setlist was ultimately divided evenly between her superstar-making album, “Golden Hour,” and the new one, with eight selections from each; her other three albums were afforded only one song apiece. Splitting it up that evenly made for a good balance of moods, as “Golden Hour” was her dreamy honeymoon album and “Deeper Well” is her older-and-wiser, feeling-mostly-good-about-waking-up-from-a-slumber album. Thus, “Butterflies,” an almost impossibly romantic song from her breakthrough — and still an irresistible tune, even if it must seem naive to her and some of her fans now — was soon followed by the new album’s “Too Good to Be True,” a number about having butterflies again and being wary as hell about it.

“Happy & Sad,” the actually semi-upbeat “Lonely Weekend,” the less sanguine “Lonely Millionaire”… Musgraves knows how to keep bittersweetness going as a theme for an extended chunk of a concert.

A four-song interlude with her band playing acoustically out on a B-stage brought up some of her most vivid numbers, including the only two whimsical pre-“Golden Hour” oldies: “Follow Your Arrow” and “Family is Family.” These songs are not solely light-hearted, of course: Musgraves introduced “Arrow” with a good-hearted stock speech about how she “made a ton of friends in the LGBTQIA+ community that hadn’t really been around me, to be honest, growing up.” “Family,” the most uptempo, grinning-and-picking song of the night, had its own preamble about “being from this really tiny, bitty town called Golden,” which produced a roar that had the singer responding, “It’s not something to cheer for, really. It’s really not. If you like meth, perhaps. Maybe. … I’m just kidding. No, it’s great if you love other drugs, too.”

Her sense of humor, mostly under wraps since her much wry-er first two records, is still well in evidence in concert. That continued with the final selection she did on the B-stage, for which she was joined by opening act Nickel Creek for an even wider congregation of pickers, saying they were about to do “an old murder ballad,” which, however plausible that sounded in the immediate company, turned out to be SZA’s “Kill Bill.”

She got more serious just prior to that with “The Architect,” a song from the latest album that addresses theodicy, better known as the problem of evil, and how a just God allows bad things to happen to good people… or, in the context of the verses, how he allows good things to happen to just OK people such as herself. It’s a lot to bite off, this anthem, which was written in response to Nashville’s Covenant School shootings. But it chews easier when it’s pros like Shane McAnally and Josh Osbourne helping her write the tune, and when it’s delivered in nearly nursery-rhyme tones with a flawlessly tender soprano. On this particular night Musgraves asked for moments of silence, to send good vibes to the victims of Hurricane Helene, admitting that she didn’t know whether to call it prayer or manifestation… true to the song that followed, which concluded by wondering “if there’s an architect.”

In the return to the main stage, “Justified” turned up as a recent reintroduction on this tour from her “Star-Crossed” album, which packed more mixed feelings about a divorce into one song than very many songs have been able to. But there’s a less emotionally ambiguous song that Musgraves has only put into the set for part of the tour, which was just as welcome an addition — “Anime Eyes,” the number from the new album that is most blissfully about a crush (hence the googly peepers of the weirdly clever title). It served as a nice reminder that her “honeymoon” phase hasn’t completely ended yet, even on a record with as many juxtaposed feelings as “Deeper Well.”

She clearly is just fine about having one lone banger in her set — the disco-styled “High Horse.” Surely embracing the fact that The Gays love her and The Gays love that song, she’s prefacing it on the fall leg of her tour with another anthem that appeals directly to that part of her adopted community: Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” Inglewood isn’t West Hollywood but she did her best to make them sister cities for a few minutes.

Musgraves went back to the top of the world — that is, the globe part of her production design — for “Rainbow,” the kids’ song that is really a grown-up’s aspirational anthem, or vice versa. This capped Musgraves’ experiment in creating a buzz without buds, since she sang earlier, in “Deeper Well,” about giving up weed (even though the references to relying on it have not been excised from “Slow Burn” or “Follow Your Arrrow”). Whether anyone else who is trying to give up the stuff can last through election season might remain to be seen, but Musgraves comes off as a good role model for that — practicing calm, acknowledging the storm, minding the gap.

For an audience of a certain mindset, it’s hard to imagine a better triple-bill than the one Musgraves was topping on this leg of the tour. Father John Misty served as middle act — much more angst-fueled than the headliner, but just as enjoyable — and Nickel Creek filled the opening spot, exuding pure virtuosic string-band joy, whether dedicating “To the Airport” to LAX (“We’ve never played this close to an airport before”) or covering Britney Spears’ “Toxic.”

That was it for Misty on the bill, but Musgraves’ tour is continuing through early December with Lord Huron in the middle slot and Nickel Creek still opening. The remaining U.S. dates:

Nov. 7 — Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena
Nov. 9 — Baltimore, MD @ CFG Bank Arena
Nov. 10 — Pittsburgh, PA @ PPG Paints Arena
Nov. 12 — Louisville, KY @ KFC Yum! Center
Nov. 13 — Columbus, OH @ Schottenstein Center
Nov. 15 — Brooklyn, NY @ Barclays Center
Nov. 16 — Brooklyn, NY @ Barclays Center
Nov. 21 — Houston, TX @ Toyota Center
Nov. 22 — Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center
Nov. 23 — Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center
Nov. 26 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center
Nov. 27 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center
Nov. 29 — Tampa, FL @ Amalie Arena
Nov. 30 — Hollywood, FL @ Hard Rock Live at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood
Dec. 2 — Orlando, FL @ Kia Center
Dec. 5 — Charlotte, NC @ Spectrum Center
Dec. 6 — Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena
Dec. 7 — Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena