Grammy Award winning country music star Kacey Musgraves began teasing new music over the weekend on her social media, making fans wonder if they were finally getting a new song or two. It turns out fans are getting a lot more than just a new song.
Musgraves announced her fourth studio album, Star-Crossed, will be released September 10, along with a 50-minute film version of the album streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. The trailer looks like it’s going to take fans on a very weird journey.
The album’s title track was also released, and it gives fans a glimpse of what the album and film will (probably) center around: Musgraves feelings and experience about her recent divorce from fellow singer/songwriter Ruston Kelly. The opening track sets the scene with “Two lovers ripped right at the seams / Woke up from the perfect dream / And then the darkness came / Signed the papers yesterday / You came and took your things away / I moved out of the home we made / And gave you back your name.”
The trailer features Musgraves in a wedding dress as the song plays in the background. We also get glimpses of guest actors like Eugene Levy, Victoria Pedretti, Courtney Parchman, Princess Nokia and more.
According to Variety, Musgraves worked with director Bardia Zeinali and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who was behind movies like A Star is Born and Black Swan. Zeinali characterized the film as having “a sense of heightened reality,” as they wanted it “to feel cinematic and epic without compromising the heart and the emotion, to feel fantastical and heightened and tell her story through the lens of art and fashion.”
In an interview with Apple Music Monday, she revealed more about the new album and how tragedy inspired both her album and concept for the film, particularly the idea of being “star-crossed.”
“You’re ill-fated, it’s just not written in the stars,” Musgraves explained in the interview. “It is not for you. And everyone puts out their highlight reel, nobody’s putting out their f**k-ups. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s daunting. But I’m excited to share Star-Crossed just because people know me to be a songwriter that writes about what I’m going through. And I think it would have been extremely awkward if I just acted this last chapter didn’t happen for me. So I think you saw my highlight reel with Golden Hour, and this is the other side of that. And I mean, there are beautiful parts of that too.”
The track list for “Star-Crossed”:
- Star-Crossed
- Good Wife
- Cherry Blossom
- Simple Times
- If This Was a Movie..
- Justified
- angel
- Breadwinner
- Camera Roll
- Easier Said
- Hookup Scene
- Keep Lookin’ Up
- What Doesn’t Kill Me
- There is A Light
- Gracias a la Vida
