Marginalia
“Star-Crossed” is Musgraves’s divorce album, a song cycle about how a relationship deteriorates: not all at once, or in huge shards, but decrementally. It’s full of small memories, good and bad, rendered largely without judgment.
If being in love made Musgraves feel connected to the world, these songs find her burrowing inward, questioning everything. Accordingly, the tragedy unfolding on the album is not that of a good relationship turning bad; it is of a once-confident person losing touch with the things that made her feel complete, worried that life might never be so simple again.