Kacey Musgraves takes us on a trip that’s pure gold
Word on the bandwidth is that Kacey Musgraves dropped acid while listening to a Tame Impala record and now she’s the greatest countrysingerforpeoplewhodon’tlistentocountrymusic that our dumb century has ever heard.
What a dim way to think about Musgraves’s “Golden Hour,” an extraordinary new album which, sure, may have been inspired by hallucinogens and pseudo psychrock but still aces many of the tests that we expect a great country album to pass. For one, if country music is about everyday life, here’s a songwriter arguing that awe and bewilderment are essential to our everyday lives. What a heavy thought to make light. Our wonderment is completely ordinary.
And while Musgraves seems to be gazing into this titanic truth through a drowsy thirdeye, her calm feels particularly untrippy during “Oh, What A World,” a small song about big mysteries. Across two sweetly sung verses, she jots down a grocery list of mindblowers — the aurora borealis, bioluminescent sea creatures, psychoactive plants, a belief in reincarnation, the possibility of a multiverse — and then repeats a little mantra to keep her brain from float ing off into the void like a slippery helium balloon. “These are real things,” she tells herself. “Yeah, these are real things.”
For realityobsessed country music fans, that’s a serious piece of bubble gum to chew on. Musgraves’ reality is the only one she has to go by.
You need to hear the music, though. It’s easy to reduce a country song to its lyrics, and Musgraves knows that the real meaning of a song lies in how the voice illuminates the words, anyway. So now she seems to be approaching her singing as if it were some kind of meditation. Instead of going on lungscorching rocket rides or sinking into pillowy whisper games, Musgraves only ever appears to be moving toward the stillness of the center of her voice. The effect can be strange and beautiful. She sounds her most emotive whenever she sounds her most bored. And what’s boredom, really? The softest kind of yearning.