Did Kacey Musgraves Write ‘Cardinal’ for Me?

AFTER MY GRANDMA died, I began to pay attention to cardinals. She loved watching birds through her kitchen windows, and the memorial cards at her funeral displayed an illustration of a cardinal. After that, every cardinal I saw felt like a message sent by my grandma from heaven, reminding me that she was looking out for me, and that she wasn’t really gone, not fully. 

So, when I listened to “Cardinal,” the first track on Kacey Musgraves’ latest album Deeper Well, I felt like Musgraves wrote the song for me.

“Cardinal,” she sings, “are you bringing me a message from the other side?”

With songs about finding peace and falling in love, growing up and maturing, Deeper Well is spiritually grounding. A reminder to slow down, go outside, and appreciate what we have.

Musgraves, whose 2018 album Golden Hour won album of the year and best country album at the Grammys, often pushes the boundaries of the genre: Her album star-crossed was deemed ineligible (not country enough) for best country album at the 2022 Grammys, and her lyrics often push back against the conservative social values used to sell country music; her absence on country-music radio has perplexed people in the industry for years. Yet there is no doubt that Deeper Well, her sixth studio album, is country. The stripped-back instrumentation relies heavily on acoustic guitar and banjo, and her lyrics wax poetic about her “home state of Texas,” while still noting her disdain for “their laws.”

Deeper Well is also full of themes familiar to people of faith. “The Architect” ponders the nature of God, with the repeated question, “Can I speak to the architect?” Musgraves marvels at the “perfect design” of “something as small as an apple / It’s simple and somehow complex.” She tackles a subject Christians have grappled with for centuries: Are our lives dictated by fate or free will? She asks the architect, or God, the same question in several ways: “Are there blueprints or plans?” she sings. “Do we have any say in this mess?” and then, drawing on biblical imagery of God as a potter, “Am I shapable clay?”

In “Dinner with Friends,” Musgraves shows that even in an album oriented toward love and contentment, she isn’t immune to darkness. Twice during the Sound of Music-esque song about all her favorite things — fireflies in June, the smell of a lover’s clothes, the texture of pink champagne cake — she dips into a minor key, changing the mood; these are the lovely things she “would miss / from the other side.” It is a song about things to be grateful for, the type of song most needed in the moments when you can’t remember a single one of those things.

Musgraves is trying to see the world with “Anime Eyes,” the name of track 13 and a reference to the stars that twinkle in the disproportionally large eyes of anime characters when they’re in love. Musgraves, however, wants anime eyes all the time, even when life gets hard. She isn’t settling for shallow and fleeting fixes — “The money and the diamonds and the things that shine / Can’t buy you true happiness,” she says in “Lonely Millionaire.” Instead, she’s drawing her life’s meaning from a “deeper well” — something Christians might simply call “faith.”