Post and Jam: "Starcrossed" by Cacey Musgraves

[raven_cromwell]

Watch on YouTube

[Musgraves has never even been on my radar but fuck! this is gorgeous and haunting and *flails*]

Comments

[delphi]

I love Kacey Musgraves - Merry Go 'Round is one of my all-time favourite songs - but this one was new to me. Thanks so much for sharing it!

Also, I believe a Happy Birthday is in order? I hope you're having a good one. :)

[raven_cromwell]

*hugs* I really needed this comment right about now. It's not been a bad birthday--I have cake! for later, and get to have a lovely, lazy Sunday. But was def a bit blue and missing Mum, especially turning thirty and doing the accompanying navel-gazing I think we all do when we're entering a new decade. Especially if we're not...to borrow a merry-go-round pun, where tradition tells us we should be, in one form or another.

Now, I've been thoroughly and delightfully distracted by a brilliant piece--fuck! how did this not get on my radar before now! That first verse just hits straight in the guts, but then I was utterly charmed and transported by the merry word-play in the choruses!!!!!!!!

damn!!!!! there are lyrics that cut so sharp and true in this! settling like dust in this town. Tiny little boxes in a row, aint what you want but what you know. Those just pinned and gutted because yeah. isn't that what all of us who come from a certain crushing, semirural poverty fear? that all our treadmilling won't be enough--that we'll either never leave, or end up back in a tiny little box, settling like dust.

And then that just fucking genius ending--bored until we die FUCK it's such brilliant bitter-dry but true for so much of poverty and its crushing despair humor.

Capped off by that last little bit, seeming at first so random, about Jack and Jill and all their deep addictions, but feeling so cathartic in the same way Sondheim's Into The Woods feels triumphant and beautiful for me when it makes all the edges of the fairytales raw and bloody, with no easy answers. This, she's screaming, is what the ends of "fairytales" would look like, if you're poor and desperate. But yet!!!!! it becomes this gorgeous anthem, with that final bit of merry word-play when merry don't give a damn no more and you're left with this visceral glee because Merry may just break the whole rotten thing wide open.

And it's never a bleak song--raw and true, but never...heavy. There's that bright music underneath, sometimes feeling deliberately ironic when juxtaposed against y'know dad hooked on merry two doors down. But mostly just making you hard-scrabble grin because even in the bleakest of circumstances, you can make 'em funny and bright. *flails* I was constantly reading yesterday that she had clever word-play and damn, do I know what that was about now! :)

Gaaaaah, you have glorious, unparalledly good taste <333333333.

[delphi]

I'm glad you had cake and a lazy Sunday, but it's an understandably tough milestone to be hitting, especially with your mother. *hugs*

I found my thirtieth a tough one, myself. Even though I knew the system was broken, and that some milestones didn't actually have the value I once thought they had, I was still lugging at least twenty years of expectations with me. But if it helps: wow, were my thirties ever better than my twenties, and at 37 I'm the happiest I've ever been, even under trying circumstances. I hope there's nothing but better things ahead for you.

And I'm glad you liked the song! For equally delightful but more lighthearted wordplay from Kacey Musgraves, I'm also awfully fond of:

Follow Your Arrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8xqyoZXCc

and

Biscuits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGIUtLO_x8g

Better sentiments for embarking on a new decade, maybe. :D