Day 146: Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour
I’m really luxuriating with a night at home by myself today and I wanted to pick the perfect album to accompany it, so today I took ages to pick the right thing. Kacey Musgraves seemed like the perfect option since I’m keen to branch out a little bit and this new kind of country music is something I haven’t particularly explored – I’ve heard “Slow Burn” from her critically acclaimed third album but had never heard the whole thing, so Golden Hour it is.
Album cover courtesy of MCA Nashville
Kacey Musgraves is a singer-songwriter from Texas who’s been writing songs since she was eight years old. She’s also a national yodelling champion and used to be a professional Hannah Montana impersonator at parties, before her music career took off enough for her to live on it. She’d released two albums before hitting it big with Golden Hour in 2018, which earned her a Grammy for Album of the Year, along with Best Country Album, Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Song.
Before writing Golden Hour, Kacey Musgraves had been in a creative funk, having just broken up with her boyfriend and suffering from a crisis in confidence. Then she met her future husband and collaborator, singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, and she started writing the album. She got an entirely new team around her and started exploring a new sound, moving away from traditional instruments into a more electronic sound that she calls cosmic country.
If there’s one word I’d use to describe the sound, it’s effortless. Every part of it just sounds like something that flowed out of her. When she was writing it, she was about to get married, so a large part of the album is focused on love and relationships, along with a bit about her state of mind at the time. She’s not the traditional conservative country darling – she’s readily admitted that some of the album was written on acid – but the album is still country, yet contemporary enough that she toured as an opener for Harry Styles after releasing it.
I thought I’d like it, but I didn’t think I’d like it this much. I found myself crying to it, which is a bit strange because I’m having a nice day and I’m not even crying at any particularly tear-jerky parts, it’s just very beautiful. I don’t even cry to music that often – every once in a while, sure, but it’s still fairly rare. Golden Hour is going into rotation, it’s a very unexpected 10/10.