‘The Architect’ by Kacey Musgraves: how to write a song about God
“Orpheus was a poor boy,” go the lyrics of Anais Mitchell’s Broadway smash Hadestown, “but he had a gift to give. He could make you see how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is.” Kacey Musgraves has the exact same gift. A way of looking at the world and seeing something beautiful, sun-kissed and worth protecting, yet never flinching from the atrocities that scar its surface and run the risk of rotting it to its very core. It’s a way of seeing the world more important than ever.
Musgraves debuted in 2013 with the album Same Trailer, Different Park. However, it was her fourth album, 2018’s masterpiece Golden Hour, that didn’t just break her into the mainstream but saw her songwriting honed into the signature style we know today. It’s an album of quite staggering beauty, looking at the world and seeing a blend of tranquillity and dazzling colour is seen previously only in Monet landscapes.
Yet, it never steps into cloying or overly sentimental territory thanks to Musgrave’s whip-smart lyricism. It’s an album with a wonderful sense of humour about itself, one that begins with the line “born in a hurry / always late / haven’t been early since ‘88”. When the album comes together on songs like ‘Slow Burn’, ‘Space Cowboy’ and ‘Rainbow’, a song I cannot listen to without blubbing like a child, few albums I’ve ever heard match it for sheer grace and power.
So how in God’s name do you follow an album like that up? Musgrave’s first attempt, 2021’s divorce record Star-Crossed, is a decent record that pales in comparison. No judgement there, most things do. It wouldn’t be until 2024 that she would release an album that legitimately stood up to Golden Hour. Deeper Well is a stripped back, acoustic record in contrast to the genre-hopping of Star-Crossed and all the better for it.
How did Kacey Musgraves recover?
By focusing on Musgrave’s crystalline voice, both as a singer and as a songwriter, the album puts her back on track to becoming the bridge between country’s past and present. Nowhere is this clearer than on the record’s indisputable high point and centrepiece, ‘The Architect’. Here, Musgraves does the seemingly impossible and writes a country song about God that speaks to all sides of the argument about the man upstairs eloquently and gorgeously.
The roots of the song come from an unbearable tragedy. In March 2023, a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, took the lives of three children and three adults not far from the studio where Musgraves was working on the album. At the time, she thought the album was finished, but the day after the news broke, upon sitting down with co-writers Josh Osborne and Shane McAnally, a song inspired by the previous day’s events began to take shape.
Musgraves spoke about this in an interview with American Songwriter, saying, “We were talking about the beauty and the terror of being a human, the conversation started flowing. Josh just goes, ‘Can I speak to the architect? What’s going on here in this world?’ It really was born out of a real conversation… Some songs just write themselves.” Not only was the song a natural response to the attack, but it also tapped into the whole album’s themes of spirituality and faith.
Topics that are normally anathema in modern country. It’s not that they’re not touched upon, quite the opposite, Nashville is stuffed with lowest common denominator hollers about Gee-suss and church, stringing them together mad-libs style to pander to middle America. ‘The Architect’, in its sensitivity and eloquence, couldn’t be more different.
Musgraves starts with an apple. A creation “simple and somehow complex / Sweet and divine / the perfect design” that alludes to their being a titular “architect”. So far, so sixth form philosophy, but the song deepens from a legitimately shocking question in the third verse, “Was it thought out at all / or just paint on a wall? / Is there anything that you regret?” Suggesting a creator’s fallibility on a song about God is a truly wild thing to come from modern Nashville. In the state Musgrave, her co-writers and everyone else were in at the time of writing, though, one that’s totally understandable.
Love, body image, the chaos of the modern world. A song that seems ready-made to be a straightforward “only God could make all these cool things” anthem instead goes the opposite direction. Standing in such astonishment at the chaos, beauty, madness and dread of the world, Musgraves finds herself not asking to speak to the person responsible for it anymore, but in the haunting final words of the song, asking if there is a person responsible for it at all.
Mitchell’s Orpheus is a romantic. Starry-eyed and hopeful, but who eventually falls when confronted with the hardship of the real world. Mitchell goes one better. Yes, hers is an idealized view of the world, but it’s one that takes the hardships as part of it, much like Orpheus’ love for Eurydice. Perhaps that makes Musgraves the happy medium between the two: never losing sight of the miracles around us and using them to take strength when winter falls. Her music is that for me when I feel that chill, and I hope it can be the same for you.
