Kacey Musgraves didn’t think she’d win the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Country Song for “The Architect.”
She expressed her surprise from the stage during her acceptance speech and credited her team and fans.
“There’s so much darkness in this world right now, and it just feels so good to be able to fight some of that darkness through song,” Musgraves said. “It’s such an honor.”
Musgraves co-wrote “The Architect” with frequent collaborators Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, and the song is from her “Deeper Well” album that she released last year.
It’s also a song she didn’t want to need to write. “The Architect” was the last song they wrote for Deeper Well, and the writing session was a couple of weeks after the Covenant School shooting ( March 27, 2023) in Nashville. Three children and three adults were murdered.
Videos by American Songwriter
Kacey Musgraves: “Nashville Didn’t Feel Right for a Long Time”
“I think I can speak for everybody whenever I say Nashville did not feel right for a long time after that,” Musgraves told American Songwriter. “It just was so horrific and unbelievable as all of those things are. But this one, obviously, was very close to home.”
Meeting her collaborators on a sunny day to do their jobs and write songs felt “just ridiculous” to her when there were parents down the street suffering. They didn’t know what to write about or what to say.
Kacey Musgraves Shares the “Deeper” Inspiration Behind Her New Album “Deeper Well”
“We were talking about the beauty and the terror of being a human,” she said. “The conversation started flowing.”
She had the title “The Architect” written down but didn’t know what to do with it.
“If you say something like that in a room with either Shane or Josh in two milliseconds, you’re going to have your answer,” she said. “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. And I was holding a little green apple whenever I was sitting in there. That song was written super fast. Some songs just write themselves.”
“Some Songs Just Write Themselves”
Lyrics include: One day, you’re on top of the mountain| So high that you’ll never come down| Then the wind at your back carries ember and ash| Then it burns your whole house to the ground| Is it thought out at all, or just paint on a wall?| Is there anything that you regret?| I don’t understand, are there blueprints or plans?| Can I speak to the architect?
Musgraves is happy they kept their writing appointment that day—and compared songwriting to fishing.
“You never know what you’re going to get,” she said. “Songwriting is literally casting a line out into some deep water. Sometimes you pull up a twig, and sometimes you pull up a frigging treasure trove. You just don’t know. I was like, ‘Let’s just see what we get.’”
Sometimes, she said, the lyrics don’t come easily. She has to labor over the words and piecing them together is like a puzzle.
Kacey Musgraves Tries to Strike Conversational Balance
“By the end of the day, you are brain dead because you’re like, ‘God, I cannot make this. Where is this missing piece?’” she said, explaining that she’s always trying to find a conversational balance. “I will not just put something in a song that I don’t fully get behind. Even if it takes me two months to finish something, it’s funny, you’ll just be doing the laundry one day and it’s like, ‘Boom. Oh, duh. There’s that line right there.’ Some songs just are begging to be written. You crack open the door and they just freaking fly out. That was one of ’em.”
Photo by Astrida Valigorsky/WireImage
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.