“Healing doesn’t happen in a straight line,” sang Kacey Musgraves on “justified,” the lone cut from 2021’s star-crossed wedged near the end of her twenty-song set at Toronto’s Scotiabank’s Arena. She’d be one to know — it takes a lot of fucking around to find that Deeper Well.
The country superstar has taken quite the winding road searching for hard-earned peace on the way to Toronto. Since a snowstorm canceled the city’s 2022 tour finale, Musgraves has been keeping busy: catching a speeding ticket (yet not the northern lights) on a weather-beaten video shoot in Iceland, crashing her bike on an Irish solo trip mere weeks before the Deeper Well world tour, and sadly canceling the Montreal date set to open this final leg.
Maybe healing happens in a circle. On her long-awaited return to Toronto, thankfully the only force of nature accompanying Musgraves was her wide-eyed wonder at the natural world — a much-needed ray of sunshine to cut through the current moment’s man-made chaos.
Continuing on from Musgraves’s last leg, Nickel Creek began the night with a career-spanning set, putting all their bluegrass sass into a real cunt-ry rendition of Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” Fiddle and mandolin felt well-suited to the folksier sounds of Deeper Well, and Lord Huron‘s high-lonesome western noir fit nicely beside Musgraves’s spacey psychedelia.
Cued by an Irish jig, the sage green curtain rose to reveal a galaxy’s worth of sparkling stars as Musgraves walked in view from behind a low hill. Throughout the set, it morphed from disco ball to neon moon, to grassy ground and the Earth itself, creating a space somewhere between gazing at the stars and being amongst them.
Lit in red and shrouded in fog, Musgraves amplified the ’70s soft rock “Cardinal” to its highest level, the belief that the bird is the spirit of lost loved ones made all the more mystic when she literally levitated at the end. Taking a leaf out of Mother Nature’s book is Musgraves’s way of understanding the world. She rolled through imagery of pure love as metamorphosis (“Butterflies”), resilience as a storm-beaten palm (“Sway”), and finding love like catching a radiant sunset (“Golden Hour”). Tying wide-eyed wonder over the beauty of nature to the beauty of love is what made these all the more poignant.
But not everything was seeped in symbolism and deep meaning. Musgraves’s wry sense of humour was turned up to 11 — Sad Kermit got some screen time during “Lonely Weekend,” “Golden Hour” turned to “golden shower,” and cheeky mid-song asides made the performance all the more intimate.
Firecracker wit and a fine-tuned pen are what makes country music so human and compelling, and Musgraves’s skill in each has made her stand out as a troublemaker and trailblazer. Moving to a small stage covered in moss and lavender, she came into her crowd and scaled back her six-piece band for some of her most heartfelt music.
“We’re all driven by the same things. We all crave the same love. Having someone say my music makes them feel invited to a party they’ve always wanted to be part of means so much more than any bad stuff anyone has said,” she said before freedom-chasing anthem “Follow Your Arrow,” tearing up mid-song. Nickel Creek joined for what Musgraves called a “historical Canadian murder ballad” that turned out to be a cover of SZA’s “Kill Bill,” perhaps a wink as to whether that lover really was “Too Good to Be True.”
The hearts of her diverse crowd now fully captured, Musgraves’s return to the main stage felt like a victory lap as she rolled through some of her biggest hits. On the small or large stage, her clear and calm voice was always as pristine as on record, with a tight band that made each song more impactful. Perhaps the only thing lacking was the absence of the shimmering “Heart of the Woods” — its message that “it’s in our nature to look out for each other” would be all the more appreciated in this political climate.
Deeper Well is as much concerned with preserving peace as it is with finding it, because more than ever, peace is pretty damn hard to come by. Maybe losing yourself in song is all that’s necessary in a world that’s easy to feel lost in. “Those country songs, huh?” she quipped at the end of her rendition of Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon,” last performed in 2019 — a knowing wink to the power of her own songs and how much they were appreciated, maybe even needed.
