Kacey Musgraves’ personal life might have been very different had the coronavirus pandemic not taken place.
Last July, the 32-year-old singer and her husband, Ruston Kelly, filed for divorce after nearly four years of marriage. In the June/July issue of ELLE magazine, Musgraves admits that she may have stayed in the relationship longer had it been a different kind of year.
“I could have coasted for another couple of years,” she says, noting that she was “just not paying attention to my feelings or not really dealing with some things.”
Musgraves, however, started asking herself some hard questions while in quarantine, including, “Why did I make these decisions? How did I get here? How can I prevent myself from getting there again? Why do I keep choosing the same kind of people?”
“I felt, in many ways, on top of the world in my career, but in my personal life, I felt like I was dying inside,” she shares. “I was crumbling. I was sad. I felt lonely. I felt broken.”
Musgraves says she’s put all these emotions into her new music. “It’s daunting to put your emotions about something really personal on display. I haven’t spoken much about this chapter, and I don’t feel like I owe that to anyone, but I owe it to myself as a creator to flesh out all these emotions that I’ve felt, and I do that through song,” she explains. “It would be strange if I didn’t acknowledge what happened in my life creatively, but it is scary to be like, ‘I’m about to share my most personal thoughts about me, about this other person, about a union that I had with someone.’ I mean, I’m not a ruth- less person. I care about other people’s feelings. So it’s kind of scary.”
The singer says she’s also been pondering what it means to be a so-called good wife. “I come from a family full of long marriages. My grandparents met when they were in second and third grade, and they’re still together in their 80s,” she says. “It was hard to not feel like I was in some ways a failure. …There’s nothing more shameful than staying somewhere where you don’t fit anymore.”
Musgraves has moved on from her marriage, and was recently spotted packing on some PDA with Dr. Gerald Onuoha.
