Kacey Musgraves performed songs off her new album Star-Crossed on the 47th season premiere of Saturday Night Live.
Musgraves played a stripped-down version of “Justified” as her first number, seated on a stool and strumming a guitar that obscured any clothes she may have been wearing — creating the illusion that she was naked, a subtle homage to a scene in Forrest Gump. “If I need just a little/More time to deal with the fact/That you should have treated me right,” she sang, her legs crossed in cowboy boots.
For her second song, Musgraves gave the live debut of “Camera Roll,” a bittersweet ballad about the old memories we all have in our phones. Dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt and performing barefoot, Musgraves emphasized the stark lyrics of the song — “I don’t wanna see ’em/But I can’t delete ’em/It just doesn’t feel right yet.”
The appearance marked Musgraves’ second time as musical guest on SNL. She first performed on the long-running sketch comedy series in 2018 in support of her Grammy-winning album Golden Hour.
Musgraves released Star-Crossed, the follow-up to Golden Hour, in September. It’s a cinematic record full of lush production and personal lyrics inspired in part by the Nashville songwriter’s divorce. She’ll support the album with the Star-Crossed: Unveiled Tour, kicking off January 19th in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Musgraves has described the LP as a modern tragedy in three acts. “This last chapter of my life and this whole last year and chapter for our country — at its most simple form, it’s a tragedy,” Musgraves told Rolling Stone in a February cover story.. “And then I started looking into why portraying a tragedy is actually therapeutic and why it is a form of art that has lasted for centuries. It’s because you set the scene, the audience rises to the climax of the problem with you, and then there’s resolve. There’s a feeling of resolution at the end. I was inspired by that.”