Have You Noticed These Soft Signals?
deeper well, tradwives, shera seven and the soft life
Tuesday was full of labour. I went to work. I replied to emails. Took calls. Did push-ups. I filed my taxes. After closing my laptop, I felt a nudge to release myself from the day and catch the last wisps of sunlight.
I went outside for a walk.
I had been out of town for most of the week prior and had an empty fridge to prove it. I thought once (and then twice) about ordering in but sought the domesticity and hug of a home-cooked meal. And so, on my way home, I stopped at a random grocery store to pick up things for dinner.
Without the wits to grab a cart, I artfully smothered chicken breast, Brussels sprouts, green onions, shrimp, oat milk, and sour straws against my chest and shuffled to the cashier. She asked me where I was from, maybe sensing that I was an alien to the store. I told her.
“Do they have Foodtown there?” she asked.
Back at home, I lit a Tuscan rosemary candle, changed the water in the tulip vase, and rubbed mandarin rind cream into my fists before working on dinner. I chopped the green onions and sizzled its ringlets under a tack of salted butter with low heat. I cleaned the chicken with lemon juice and salt before adding it to the pan, slowly bathing the dish’s contents in cream, black pepper, cayenne, and crushed garlic. The new Ariana hummed innocuously in the background. As potatoes from the farmer's market boiled for a mash, I got the idea to bake muffins. From scratch. With the roast in the oven, I beat eggs, maple syrup, vanilla extract, nutmeg, cinnamon, white sugar, honey, flour, chocolate chips, and crushed pistachios into a thick dough and separated it across two sets of muffin trays. I don’t know where the trays came from. I wouldn’t say I particularly enjoy muffins.
Feeling separated from the labour of the day, I pulled out my phone and texted this to the group chat:
I’d done it. I had achieved: the soft life. The demands of capitalism couldn’t stop me from coddling myself. From my domestic duty and its cozy pleasures. From denying myself the rejuvenating luxury of gifted! eucalyptus! shower! spray! To paraphrase the softest man on earth, Drake1: I am dark skin but I am still a light n*gga! I relished in what felt like a return to tradition.
To contrast the uphill grudge of real life, I have noticed an attraction to what I would like to call ‘soft signals.’ Soft signals are compulsion towards luxury, domesticity, and a gentle way of living that feels culturally traditional while politically ambient. As these signals are less of an alarm and more of a murmur, you may have missed them.
A soft signal is a Nara Smith video where she prepares her family home-cooked meals from scratch while wearing designer Gucci. A soft signal is Laura Harrier referring to her style not as ‘quiet luxury’ but as ‘expressive minimalism.’ It’s the viral popularity of The Row’s Margaux bag. A soft signal is Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey, and Kacey Musgraves all announcing country albums that promise to remind you of your roots, of your home.
I first heard Deeper Well on a long car ride to upstate New York last weekend. We passed through certified ‘villages’ with populations of less than 4,000. I pointed as we passed hobbit-ville-looking churches and markets cosplaying as grocery stores. As we slipped into the woodsy thicket, our phone service and GPS signal grew weak. But, for some reason, the music kept playing.
Deeper Well is singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves’ sixth studio album, released on Friday, March 15th, 2024. The album fuses folky strings with rolling ballads while Musgraves’ gentle lilt flutters over the subtle instrumentation like a hummingbird. The songwriting is introspective with the introductory lyrics of the lead single declaring that Musgraves’ ‘Saturn has returned.’ With this, we are to assume that the chaos of her youth has dissipated and a new clarity has been achieved. The stripped production, often consistent from song to song, pulls focus to Musgrave’ words, signaling an actualization nestled in a simpler, softer path.
On the project, we return to Eden, frolicking in its wilderness and meeting its inhabitants. Red birds deliver messages from those who have passed. The trot of horse hooves punctuates ballads as well as Gregorian chants and ohms that mimic Joshua Tree sound baths. It’s possess as secular spirituality. It’s an upstate New York trip that meets a Muskoka, Ontario lake dip. It’s ayahuasca followed by mint tea. At times, the storytelling, accompanied by the plucking of strings, feels so Joni (welcome back to Spotify, bb) while the soaring, witchy melodies pinpoint the landscape somewhere in the earthy world of Stevie. It’s the album you make after the divorce album. After you’ve settled in court, sorted your finances, and moved on to better dick. There is space for some hard things in a soft life, I guess.
‘Lonely Millionaire’ was an early favourite of mine. On it, Musgraves remarks on how the shiny prizes of the new world will never satiate you like homegrown, human connection:
“You can wear the gold watch on your wrist, but it won’t give you back the moments you miss… The money and the diamonds and the things that shine can’t buy you true happiness.”
Deeper Well feels like a return to tradition for the artist and the listener. For Musgraves, the album more faithfully resembles her critically acclaimed Golden Hour than her previous project. For fans, the album is a soft signal, a nostalgic nod to a more docile, pleasant life. The comfortable home Kacey has built within herself has been unlocked by the wilderness, her version of stumbling into a strange grocery store and grabbing chicken thighs. “It’s in our nature to look out for each other in the heart of the woods,” she calls on ‘Heart of The Woods.’
Stepping away from musical soft signals to return to influencers like Nara Smith, search interest in the term ‘tradwife’ has increased exponentially over the past twelve months.
The first time I clocked the ‘tradwife’ trend was when I participated in a reading series last fall with writer
. Del Valle read in front of a looping video projection of a woman in a log cabin making a meatball sandwich from scratch. The whole room watched attentively as she read her brilliant piece on tradwife influencers for The Baffler. In the essay, Del Valle describes a family in Utah with an influencing tradwife – a portmanteau of ‘traditional wife’ – named Hannah Neeleman at the helm:Hannah milks the cows, and Daniel raises the animals, while their sons and daughters help out with farm chores and collect the eggs every morning. Daniel butchers the meat, and Hannah cooks it. The family always eats together.
Similar to soft signals, the Neelemen’s content and their Ballerina Farms brand – which not only posits a traditional soft life but sells it to you through pricey merchandise – is politically and religiously ambivalent. This is, of course, by design. Her values, her actions, and her home-schooled kids are signals to modern-day conservatism with the slight hint of Manifest Destiny but, like any signal, it’s only smoke – not the whole fire. A quick look through the Ballerina Farms e-commerce page reveals that most of their items – the enamel mugs, the milk pitchers – are sold out. You’re left wondering what else has sold out. What else is for sale.
Del Valle continues:
Any public proclamation of the Neelemans’ beliefs, whatever they may be, would surely alienate a portion of their audience. But the words Hannah does use to describe her lifestyle are a clarion call to those who know what to listen for: living off the land is “natural,” sourdough bread is a “God-given marvel,” and the hogs they raise are “real heritage pork, the way great grandma remembers it.”
Ah, there it is. The return to tradition. Tradition is for sale.
The muffin recipe I used wasn’t from my grandmother, it was from the internet. That didn’t stop me from equating the experience to familial tradition though. I still sent a picture to my father, the baker of my childhood. He responded with “Awwwww” and then nothing else for the rest of the evening.
The lit candles, the buttermilk chicken, and the muffins are all markers of what some would say is ‘traditional feminine labour.’ To associate softness with femininity is the lowest common denominator, so much of monoculture (evidenced by what rises to the top in Google Trends) is. Cooking and building a home have long been associated with ‘female labour’ even though it has never been compensated in tandem with male labour (you know, sending emails, push-ups, and filing taxes). Despite this, it’s understood that this mix of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ labour is needed to build a comfortable home and an easy life. One can’t exist without the other. To that, it is interesting that I felt the need to dive into soft (or feminine) labour after a full day of hard (or masculine) labour, a sort of balancing of the yin-yang. The need for a soft landing after a hard (ok not that hard tbh but let me cook… literally) day.
Thousands of miles away from the Neelemans, a different creator offers her own guide to attaining a soft life. Shera Seven, known as the “sprinkle sprinkle lady,” has amassed billions of views on her content that offers dating advice. Shera’s advice is hilarious but direct, urging her followers to stay away from what she calls “dusties” (re: broke men) to prioritize relationships with affluent men who can offer them a more comfortable life, regardless of attraction and compatibility. “If you don’t like ugly guys, you don’t like money. Sprinkle, sprinkle.”
She responds to questions from her fans, everything from when is the right moment to sleep with a partner to offering guidance on ordering food to signal to a date that you are accustomed to a soft life:
“Only broke and classless people go for the fried menu, I’m sorry… On a date, [order]: grilled, blackened sauteed only. Scallops and asparagus. The house salad with balsamic vinaigrette, please? Don’t get no extra ranch and cheese. I don’t care if you drink ranch, do not order it. It don’t look good… If you’re going to eat pasta make sure it’s one you can stab with your fork like penne pasta.”
If there was a LOOSEY book club, her nineteen-page advice book would be on it, Too Pretty to Pay Bills: Keys to Gold Digging Success.
The reason why I find Shera so compelling is because you can never really tell if she’s serious or not. Like most creators, she’s clearly leaning into a character, her advice both comedic but also extremely pragmatic, leaving you to decide what – if any – is worth applying. Her delivery is so blunt that I can’t help but imagine that she’s also in on the joke but then I read the comments, and there are many who swear by her logic. Because of this, Shera is a master architect of cultivating a soft life. She is aware of the differing value between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ labour and is committed to making the system work for her, rather than getting work by the system.
In one video, a follower asks what a healthy relationship looks like. She responds in traditional Shera fashion, half sage, half jester. “All bills paid. Money in the bank.” After filing my taxes, I think she’s right.
This past Tuesday, the day I made the muffins and the mashed potatoes, was the first day of spring. Coming a day earlier than typical years, Spring’s entry feels like a yawn. A luxurious stretch of hands to the ceiling from the bed, the hit of snooze on the alarm clock. Musgraves closes the first song of Deeper Well by alluding to the supernatural tendencies of spring.
Are you just watching and waiting for spring?
Or do you have some kind of magic to bring?
Her vocals lull the listener into a lullaby of sorts, a hexing rhyme that softly tucks you back in after you’ve felt the harsh wisps of the morning rays. It feels like the melting of snow. Like the change of seasons and the blooming of spring. It feels soft. It feels like home.
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I don’t know why I am mentioning Drake two newsletters in a row… I don’t even rock with him like that anymore. I’m sorry!
So good!
Such a good deep dive on the soft life. Also only listened to Cardinal and Deeper Well- the symbolism and messages🤌🏼 Right on timeeee. Thanks for sharing!