Kacey Musgraves Explains How the Pandemic Played a Part in Her Divorce From Ruston Kelly

Kacey Musgraves filed for divorce from Ruston Kelly in July 2020 after two and a half years of marriage, and the singer opened up about what led to the split in a new interview with ELLE magazine where she explained that the pandemic forced her to confront her thoughts in a way she might not have if it had never happened. “I could have coasted for another couple of years,” she said, “just not paying attention to my feelings or not really dealing with some things.”

She began asking herself questions like, “Why did I make these decisions? How did I get here? How can I prevent myself from getting there again? Why do I keep choosing the same kind of people?” With several long marriages in her family, the 32-year-old admitted that “It was hard to not feel like I was in some ways a failure” when she got divorced, though she pointed out, “There’s nothing more shameful than staying somewhere where you don’t fit anymore.”

Musgraves turned to music to help her work through her feelings, writing around 40 songs, 15 of which made it onto her next album, which has not yet been announced. The album is structured in three acts, and Musgraves describes it as a tragedy. “The word tragedy just popped into my mind,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Whoa, what if the album was formulated like a modern Shakespearean or Greek tragedy?’” The singer shared that her latest project tells the story of “two people who love each other so much, but they cannot make it work in the physical realm to be together, because it’s just not written in the stars for them. It almost takes the blame off the two people, which is what I like, because it could be easy in a heartbreak to be like, ‘Well, you f—ed up, it’s your fault.’ ‘No, you f—ed up, it’s your fault.’ And it’s like, ‘No, let’s just blame the stars. Let’s just say that we’re not meant to be.’”

The Texas native’s new project will follow her critically acclaimed album Golden Hour, which was named Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2019, where Musgraves thanked Kelly in her acceptance speech. “If you would’ve told me the night of the Grammys, ‘Hey, in two years, you’re going to be divorced and have a whole ‘nother album written,’” she said, “I would have been like, ‘F— off. No. No way.’”

As she’s preparing to release her next album, Musgraves has experienced moments of worry about how the project will be perceived. “It’s daunting to put your emotions about something really personal on display,” she reflected. “I haven’t spoken much about this chapter, and I don’t feel like I owe that to anyone, but I owe it to myself as a creator to flesh out all these emotions that I’ve felt, and I do that through song. It would be strange if I didn’t acknowledge what happened in my life creatively, but it is scary to be like, ‘I’m about to share my most personal thoughts about me, about this other person, about a union that I had with someone.’ I mean, I’m not a ruthless person. I care about other people’s feelings. So it’s kind of scary.”