Seven years ago, I was flicking through a magazine at the hairdresser’s when I came to my horoscope. My eye was caught by a line informing me and my fellow Pisceans that we were in the final stretch of a punishing three-year visit from Saturn, the “taskmaster planet”, but pretty soon everything was going to be fine. It sounds anodyne – but I needed to hear it. I was 25 and mired in my first real heartbreak, two years into an overseas move and uncertain of whether to stick it out. Elle magazine’s 2017 Astro Guide might not have been authoritative, but it did make me feel more optimistic about the future.
It was my first encounter with the theory of the Saturn return: that in the 29-ish years it takes Saturn to orbit the sun from the point of our birth, a confronting initiation into adulthood ensues. It’s a revelation that’s hit pop recently. Ariana Grande included a 42-second spoken-word explainer from astrologer Diana Garland on her new album Eternal Sunshine. On new single Saturn, SZA expresses weariness with her self-destructive behaviours and yearns to channel the consistency and discipline associated with the planet: “Life’s better on Saturn / Got to break this pattern / Of floating away.” Kacey Musgraves begins Deeper Well, the title track of her new album, by declaring “my Saturn has returned”. (The same phrase is also emblazoned on sweatshirts, selling for $60 on her online store.)
Whether you chalk it up to Saturn or not, it’s true that life tends to get real towards one’s 30s. To Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, the transition is often accompanied by turmoil as people correct course ahead of the next development stage. Musgraves, now 35, divorced in 2020 from country singer Ruston Kelly after two and a half years of marriage. Grande, 30, is more recently split from her realtor husband, and now in a relationship with her Wicked costar Ethan Slater. SZA’s personal life is less public, but the 34-year-old’s music suggests it’s not free from turmoil.
There is no veracity to the Saturn return – despite one study suggesting that as many as 40% of Americans do not know that astrology is not scientific. Its appeal lies in its apparent framework for making sense of a world that often resists it, seeming to shed light on behaviours that may feel inexplicable. It’s effectively granting yourself permission to let go of the wheel. As Grande sings in the opening bars of her divorce album: “How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?” How do you know if you’re on the right path? You don’t! Buckle up, baby – it’s Saturn’s return!
Its appeal to pop stars is even easier to see. As they tread an uneasy line between protecting their private lives (Grande explicitly scolded prurient listeners on her recent comeback single Yes, And?) and building a publicity campaign around them, talk of astrology may serve as a convenient smokescreen, giving the impression of an intimate disclosure without revealing any detail or substance. The Saturn return also works as a relatable catch-all for celebrities’ often peculiar problems, applying to fame just as readily as it does to their listeners’ struggles to find work, housing or a half-decent match on dating apps. One way for stars to highlight that they’re just like us is to point to the planets above. You, me, Ariana Grande: we’re all equally tiny specks within the solar system! But as much as the thought of transiting Saturn may have brought Musgraves and Grande personal peace, the fact remains: it doesn’t make for very compelling songwriting.
Like the therapy-speak prevalent in modern culture and, increasingly, pop, the language of astrology gestures towards self-reflection and honesty without demonstrating it in practice. To quote the philosopher Theodor Adorno in his prescient 1974 analysis of the LA Times’ horoscopes, it “represents a layer which is neither quite admitted nor quite repressed – the sphere of innuendo, the winking of an eye and ‘you know what I mean’.” Musgraves’ Deeper Well leans heavily on this kind of generic language, blunting her old acuity as a songwriter, while the blithe, fluid invocation of both therapy and astrology on Eternal Sunshine is the only dull spot on an otherwise effervescent album.
Speaking of one’s Saturn return is not expressing vulnerability but deploying an accepted shield against it. It’s the specific details and individual point of view that make all writing, not just songs, meaningful and memorable – something that Taylor Swift has always understood. We may not have crashed a snowmobile with Harry Styles, or danced in the light of the refrigerator with Jake Gyllenhaal, but we relate to the feelings that Swift invokes there – of feeling on uncertain footing with a new partner, and having precious moments of closeness in a relationship soured by its end.
Katie Crutchfield, who performs as Waxahatchee, is similarly astute about finding that line between self-disclosure and self-protection, and individual observations and emotions that her audience might share. “As my following grows, my life gets less and less relatable,” Crutchfield told me back in December. Her compromise, for her forthcoming album Tigers Blood, was to hunt out new material. Crutchfield described being “hyper-focused” on finding inspiration in her everyday experience, and writing about it from “enough of an arm’s length” that it could apply to her listeners. It was a rewarding challenge, she said – and the fantastic Tigers Blood, released later this week, credits the endeavour. Happily, said Crutchfield, with evident satisfaction, “life gets really interesting as you age”.
If we’re to humour the fact of Saturn’s return, we can assume that Crutchfield and Swift, aged 35 and 34, are now safely out the other side. Crutchfield is five years sober, in a committed relationship and sustaining a career high; Swift has conquered the globe and seems happy in a new relationship. But if these are the fruits of their personal planetary trials, as artists they have grown not from being “tested by Saturn”, but from the lessons learned and perspectives gained through those periods of self-doubt and hardship.
As Adorno wrote, astrology’s draw is also its danger: by conceiving of freedom as “nothing more than making the best of what a given constellation of stars permits us”, we deny ourselves agency. In the hairdresser’s chair, in 2017, I was reassured by the astrologers’ promise that lighter times were just around the corner; they ended up being right. But Saturn didn’t bring meaning to those experiences, or structure that hard-won wisdom, or shape the self that I recognise today – that was all me.
