camera roll

Kacey Musgraves recorded this song for Star-Crossed, an album chronicling the singer's personal journey of heartache and healing following her 2020 divorce from Ruston Kelly. The project is reminiscent of a Greek tragedy with its three-part structure; the tracks should be listened to in order to understand the storyline. This song is the ninth out of the 15 tracks. It was inspired by Musgraves' distress after looking at some old photos of her and Ruston Kelly on her phone.

Don't go through your camera roll So much you don't know That you forgotten What a trip, the way you can flip Through all the good parts of it I shouldn't have done it Musgraves told Apple Music her ill-advised late-night scrolling came at a time when she felt she was moving on from their divorce. "I was on an upswing of confidence," she said. "I'm feeling good about these life changes, where I'm at." Then, one night, sat in her bedroom, bored and alone, she started flicking through photos of happier times with Kelly that she hadn't deleted. "Now I'm back in 2018, now I'm in 2017," Musgraves commented. "And what's crazy is that we never take pictures of the bad times. There's no documentation of the fight that you had where, I don't know, you just pushed it a little too far."

Musgraves discussed the song during an appearance on scientist Dr. Maya Shankar's podcast, A Slight Change Of Plans. "After the divorce and everything, you have all these photos of your life, your old life, in your phone and you don't know what to do with them," she said to the host. "You're like, 'Do I delete this?'" Musgraves continued: "This person didn't die.' And these are still my memories, but I don't want to see him every day. Well, you get to scrolling on your phone, like one late night, and you just wander down this dark alley with all these wonderful memories at one point and then you're just f---ing stabbed in the heart!"