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Kacey Musgraves’ music video for “Simple Times,” a song off her just released new album Star-Crossed, opens innocently enough — she and her crew even give off Clueless vibes on a wasting-time trip to the mall, emerging from a Jeep similar to that of Cher Horowitz.
But from there, things get dark quick. Musgraves and her costars — rapper Princess Nokia, RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Symone, and actress Victoria Pedretti — don chainmail face masks and arm themselves to the teeth with medieval weapons of war, before strutting into a bridal shop to terrorize the customers and lay waste to the displays.
It’s less a music video and more a short film. And for good reason: the clip is a set piece surgically removed from Musgraves’s Star-Crossed: The Film, the companion movie to her new album Star-Crossed that’s streaming now on Paramount Plus.
Musgraves calls Star-Crossed, inspired by her divorce from a fellow musician, 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,” she 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.”
