The One Thing Kacey Musgraves’s and Beyoncé’s New Albums Have in Common
Comb through the credits of the spring’s biggest pop-country albums — Kacey Musgraves’s Deeper Well, Maggie Rogers’s Don’t Forget Me, even Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter — and one name keeps popping up: Ian Fitchuk. For the past few years, the 42-year-old songwriter and producer has been pop-country’s foremost translator. Still somewhat of an outsider both in Nashville and mainstream pop music, Fitchuk has a gift for helping country artists broaden their sound, helping pop artists add a bit of twang to theirs, and helping anybody in the middle figure out where they fit. That talent became apparent with Kacey Musgraves’s paradigm-shifting 2018 album Golden Hour, which Fitchuk co-produced with Daniel Tashian. He and Tashian have since become a right hand to Musgraves, working on her 2021 follow-up, star-crossed, and her recent back-to-basics album Deeper Well. At the same time, Fitchuk has racked up credits with Maren Morris, Miranda Lambert, and Brothers Osborne — plus Harry Styles and Reneé Rapp. More recently, Maggie Rogers connected with Fitchuk for her folky third album, Don’t Forget Me, recorded in just five days in New York.
Still, Fitchuk doesn’t see himself as a country producer — just a producer for songwriters. Fresh out of a session for Musgraves (where they’re working on a Deeper Well deluxe), he broke down what might be the biggest year of his career yet.
Deeper Well is far away from the pop touches we heard on Golden Hour or star-crossed. How did the new album take shape?
Kacey was curious about what it could be like to make music in New York. She was interested in tapping into the essence of some of those Simon & Garfunkel albums that were made there and the New York folk scene. The idea to find a different set of inspirations and just to be in a different place sounded like fun — and it turns out it actually was.
At first, she was curious about writing some songs that could just be performed on a guitar. I think that she had fun both with Golden Hour and with star-crossed, dipping into different sonic realms, but at heart, she is a country artist. We were conscious to not overcook the material once we knew we had great songs.
Some people might think, Can’t you make an album anywhere? Once you’ve worked in Nashville for a while, what feels different about going someplace like New York?
I get a lot of inspiration from walking, being in a place where you have the time to just observe humanity and observe a city — in Nashville, you’re in your car. And the studios that we have in Nashville, we’ve spent a lot of time at. To me, old spaces where music has been made almost have a churchlike quality. It could be just superstitious. There are plenty of studios you can walk into that have a lot of nice gear and expensive things but don’t necessarily feel like there’s some level of enchantment.
With Kacey, how did you know when a song could stand on its own — when it was right to just leave as is?
I know this could be cliché, but you’re looking for the truth, and Kacey has a really good internal compass for what is true to her. There are songs that I love that are just great songs that in the end, she decided weren’t a part of a project or weren’t right. Not because they’re not good, but they’re not saying the thing that she wants to say or saying it in the way that is as honest as it can be.
We had so many songs that we whittled down for Deeper Well that initially, we were even talking about possibly doing a volume two. She’s somebody that the intention and the world that she’s creating is very important to her. I know there are artists that are just waiting until they have enough songs or until there’s one real great song that the label loves.
It sounds like that process must’ve felt similar to working on Don’t Forget Me with Maggie Rogers, with a lot of those songs being first takes and coming together very spur-of-the-moment.
There’s a big difference between those two processes. It was just Maggie and I, and she likes to be alone with her thoughts while she’s writing lyrics. My role with Maggie was, I would very quickly come up with a musical form, and I would go in and lay down a guitar and then lay down the drums and enough to let her listen on loop. Then, when she arrived at a place where she was really close with a melody or a lyric, she would come to me to tie it together and make sure that it was all fitting.
It was much more athletic in that way, whereas there’s something a little bit more studious about the process with Kacey, if that makes sense. Maggie was much more shoot-from-the-hip. If something feels exciting, just get it down as fast as possible and trust that the pieces are going to land.
There’s always been folk influences in Maggie’s music, but you and she brought out more of that, as well as a country side. Tell me about meeting in the middle there.
I grew up in Chicago, and my parents are classical musicians. My exposure to country music was minimal before I moved to Nashville. And even in Nashville, I’ve only been on the periphery. So I feel like my instincts come more from the fact that I was obsessed with Paul Simon’s Graceland, which, you wouldn’t call that a country album, but it is an organic album. And then I was around for Nirvana and the Counting Crows and the Wallflowers — or even Wilco. I think about it more from a singer-songwriter standpoint: James Taylor, Jim Croce. When I think about country music, I’m like, I don’t feel like that’s my wheelhouse. But I do think that figuring out a way for a song to feel good and to not be inundated with a lot of excessive production — I think I have found to surround voices in a way that hopefully brings out the essence of that artist in an intimate way.
It is funny to hear you say you don’t quite consider yourself a country person, because when Cowboy Carter came out and I was looking through the credits, your name jumped out as one of the few Nashville people who worked on that record. How did that come together?
When we started working on star-crossed, I signed a new publishing deal with Sony. I had the crazy idea of, What if we got Beyoncé on a song? It turns out I was able to get that music to her. She really reacted to star-crossed, before the record was done, and sent a beautiful email to Kacey. For a while there, we were going back and forth, and there was a song called “good wife” that it looked for a minute like Beyoncé was going to do a verse on it. In the end, it didn’t work out.
But a couple of years later, I got a call from my publisher saying Beyoncé is working on a new record. I don’t know if it was even described to me as a country record. They were like, “We’re very interested in sending Ink and Dave Hamelin and Dixson to Nashville to try to work on some songs for Beyoncé. Would you be interested in writing some songs with them? And they’d be interested in having Kacey come too.” So myself, Kacey, and the three of them spent a week in Nashville writing songs. There were not a lot of parameters given. I think we did hear “16 Carriages,” but they were like, “Don’t try to do that.”
I guess that was in the summer of ’22. Then, not uncharacteristically for Beyoncé’s world, we didn’t hear anything for a long time. I actually didn’t know until four days before the record came out and they were like, “This song is going to be on there.” And I didn’t recognize the title because it was a piece of a song that I’d worked on two years previously and hadn’t heard since then. There were other people in Nashville that wrote songs, but amazingly, I scooted through.
So you weren’t thinking about “Amen” and “Ameriican Requiem” being bookends to the album.
Oh, no. I had no idea. In fact, “Ameriican Requiem” was something that Cam brought in one day. Then Dave Hamelin brought what became “Amen,” and that particular day we merged those two ideas into one song.
I want to ask you a question that’s been on my mind that I haven’t been able to answer. People see other albums, like Cowboy Carter and Don’t Forget Me, and wonder, Wow, everybody’s making country music right now. How did this happen? How do you wrap your head around that?
I’m still trying to. I think What is country music? is an exhausting question The fact that everybody’s got different answers for that, it’s going to create endless conversation. And while that’s happening, I’m down to be making all different kinds of versions of whatever anybody thinks country music is. Because I didn’t grow up with it, by me fucking with it in any way, it’s going to be its own thing.
But as far as why it’s happening right now, I think maybe some of it is a reaction to how inundated our media consumption is. Anything that feels stripped-back or more elemental or from a story perspective is a little bit more interesting to people right now than just talking about things that popular music always talks about, which is love and heartbreak. Those are obviously themes in country music, but from a storytelling perspective that I think maybe feels comforting to people. That would be a guess, not an answer.
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