Kacey Musgraves knew from the drop that there were only two ways she’d make a career: Hers or no way at all. “There’s a lot of freedom when you do that from day one, because there’s no expectations on you,” she told Apple Music in 2018. That freedom has served the country singer-songwriter well since her 2013 debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, which established Musgraves—alongside artists like Pistol Annies and Chris Stapleton—as a quietly progressive voice in a conservative field, capable of tackling subjects like LGBTQ+ rights (“Follow Your Arrow”) or the hypocrisy of small-town life (“Merry Go ’Round”) without shedding her rootsy appeal. A native of East Texas, Musgraves (born in 1988) started releasing music in high school, making it to the reality show Nashville Star only to place seventh out of 10—an early sign that she was both of the industry and outside it. Her 2018 LP, Golden Hour, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year, was a country-pop psychedelic romance that steered even further from Nashville conventions—as on the sweet ’70s-sounding “Butterflies”— but established a genre-bending blueprint that changed modern country for years to come. When the relationship that inspired Golden Hour’s most heart-stirring tunes dissolved, Musgraves released her intimately set three-act album, star-crossed, in 2021, questioning the matter of her own freedom with quiet frankness through ballads like “camera roll” and the reflective pop single “simple times.” But on 2024’s breezy Deeper Well, Musgraves found her own mellow rhythm, forgoing whimsical pursuits in favor of meditation and a serene inner peace.