It all began with a Pinterest board. As with their first collaboration “Slow Burn,” Kacey Musgraves and Boy Smells founder Matthew Herman started a shared private Pinterest page, centered around Musgraves’ new single “Deeper Well” and the Boy Smells candle that would go along with it.
“First I try to imagine ‘what would my song look like?’ So I pull images and create a visual representation of what the song feels like, and write a description that kind of goes along with that,” the Grammy winner said Thursday evening, motioning to a printed sheet on the table in front of her with various phrases that came from her brainstorm session. The Nashville-based musician was in New York to launch “Deeper Well,” the new candle with Boy Smells, which comes on the heels of their highly successful first collab “Slow Burn” and is timed to Musgraves’ new album, due out in mid-March.
Musgraves described “Deeper Well,” the song, as “about examining the things in your life that might be holding you back and just removing resistance to growth.”
“And I think as you get older, that gets easier, you get more confident in doing that,” she added. “I just feel really grounded, and I feel like this scent is a great representation of where my head is at.”
“She’s so authentic and she lays her soul bare, and as female recording artists in Nashville go, very few of them write their own music, produce their own music, and are taking a liberal, really evolved social stance,” Herman said of Musgraves. “And I just think she’s so brave.”
The “Deeper Well” candle is both grounded and airy, “sky and also dirt,” as Musgraves puts it.
“One thing I was really inspired to try to nail with the scent is this smell of someone coming in from outside, someone that smells really good and you give them a hug and it’s someone familiar that you love,” she added. “Maybe you’ve missed them, and they smell like them, but they also smell like outside, like when you can smell the outdoors on someone. I really like that feeling.”
The album “Deeper Well” is out March 15, and was mostly all recorded at the famed Electric Lady Studios in New York’s Greenwich Village.
“It’s completely alive and vibrant and inspiring. I think there’s something to humanity being so stacked upon each other in such a small space, where emotions and personalities are really magnified in this city,” she said of working in the space. “It can be beautiful and it can be chaotic, but it’s definitely an energy that you feel when you’re walking down the street. You can’t get that really anywhere else.”
Once the album is out, she plans to celebrate with “a lot of sleep,” as well as a girls’ trip to Croatia, her first time in the country.
“It’s this beautiful villa, and it’s in the heart of the old town, it’s in this medieval city, but it’s on this turquoise ocean. It’s perfect. I’m really excited,” she said. “So it’ll be nice to treat myself. I try to be good about self care along the way, even if it’s a small thing.”
Lighting a candle might be just that thing.
