Kacey Musgraves Previews 2 New Songs From Upcoming Album

Kacey Musgraves‘ highly-anticipated new album is being kept tightly under wraps, but the country star shared two snippets from her upcoming project during a recent appearance on the podcast A Slight Change of Plans. The first song was called “Camera Roll,” and Musgraves sang a brief portion of it around 10 minutes into the episode.

“Don’t go through your camera roll / So much you don’t know that you’ve forgotten / What a trip, the way you can flip / Through all the good parts of it / But shouldn’t have done it,” the lyrics read. “Chronological order ain’t nothing but torture / Scroll too far back, that’s what you get / I don’t want to see them, but I can’t delete them / It just doesn’t feel right yet, not yet.” Musgraves told host Dr. Maya Shankar that she started writing the song after going through photos of ex-husband Ruston Kelly on her phone one night. “I just, like, could barely get through,” she said of starting to write “Camera Roll.” “I was like the ugly kind of, like, little-kid cry.”

The second song is called “If I Was an Angel,” and Musgraves was prompted to sing it after Dr. Shankar asked her about songs about change. “If I was an angel, I’d never have to change / I’d never have to change / But something’s gotta change,” it says. Musgraves’ new album will be her first since 2018’s Golden Hour, which won numerous awards including four Grammys and catapulted the Texas native to a new level of stardom.

The new project, which is expected to be released later this year, was inspired by a guided psychedelic trip Musgraves took, which she called “life-changing” in a new feature for Crack. The day after her trip, she was listening back to the playlist it was accompanied by, and, “like a lightning bolt,” she got an idea. “I opened my eyes like, ‘Tragedy – I’ve been through a f—ing tragedy!’” she recalled, referencing her divorce. The result was an album formatted to resemble a three-part Greek tragedy that deals with “denial, anger, sadness, depression, bargaining, guilt… [I’ve felt] all of those things.”

Crack shares that the album, the title of which has not been announced, features a myriad of sounds including Japanese jatos, jazz flutes, synths and banjos. “Sometimes I feel like this album has more of a foot in country than Golden Hour,” Musgraves said, adding, “You can cut [my music] up in a million different ways and still not be sure of what it is.”