Kacey in Wonderland

Kacey Musgraves took acid, ignored the rules of country, and made one of 2018’s best albums

When Kacey Musgraves attended the Country Music Association Awards in November, she decided to wear the pants: black Versace ones, to be exact, with a gold-beaded top to match. “I wanted to show up in a suit,” she says from her tour bus in Oklahoma. “When I found out Versace was interested in making me one, I was like, ‘Shit, that’s what I’m going to fucking do.’ ”

The suit was classic and modern at once, with a glistening, cosmic-cowgirl sheen — not unlike Musgraves’ third album, Golden Hour, which placed second on Rolling Stone’s list of the best of 2018 (see page 60). The LP was inspired in part by her marriage to singer Ruston Kelly, and it explores the glory of true love, the ambiguity of death and the wonder in things as simple as a neon fish. (Musgraves dropped acid while writing, which may have helped.)

Golden Hour debuted at Number Four on the charts and gave the native Texan a broader fan base, making her a fitting tourmate for Harry Styles last spring. (“It’s impossible to listen to [Musgraves] too much,” Styles tweeted.) And Musgraves didn’t just look great at the CMAs; she also took home the Album of the Year award, a sign that Nashville artists don’t need to stick to genre norms or have significant radio play to make music that resonates. (It’s a fair bet the LP will do well at the Grammys in February, too.) Now, Musgraves is hitting the road with her Oh, What a World Tour, with openers Natalie Prass, Soccer Mommy, Liza Anne and Sinclair — a mixed bag of styles, though each of the artists “write kickass songs,” in her words. “It was really important for me to bring my version of country music to a different group of people,” she says. “I didn’t want to leave country behind. I just wanted to look at it a different way.”

MARISSA R. MOSS