Kacey Musgraves

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Golden Hour
    Golden Hour
    Golden Hour

    100 Best Albums: No. 85 No one saw it coming. Not even Kacey Musgraves. There’s a reason her shocked expression at the 61st Grammy Awards—at which she won Album of the Year—went viral. After all, her 2018 album Golden Hour had been, at that point, the riskiest of her career: A passion project dedicated to fresh love, one the singer made with a new team of producers, and a little bit of LSD. Yet Golden Hour unexpectedly became an award-winning platinum smash, turning Musgraves from a critical darling with a devoted fanbase to a global superstar. Produced by Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian—and recorded in part above Sheryl Crow’s horse barn—Golden Hour is a masterpiece of ethereal country-pop. The 13 tracks here run the gamut from psychedelic to disco-forward, all of them held together by Musgraves’ poignant, witty writing and gorgeously honed vocal delivery. Yet what’s so magical about Golden Hour is that, for all its progression, it never finds Musgraves abandoning the sounds that made her previous albums so electrifying and endearing. “Slow Burn,” in its minor-key opening strums, finds Musgrave pushing her trademark acoustic guitar through a kaleidoscope of new sounds, while “Space Cowboy” is a perfect country ballad—the kind of song that feels just as wandering as a lover’s desires. And the album’s closer, “Rainbow,” is a timeless offering of comfort to queer youth: “It’ll all be all right,” she sings. They’re the last words on the album—a potent parting gift. There are also plenty of thrilling surprises to be found on Golden Hour. “Mother” is a sparse meditation on parental love that’s barely a minute long—performed on a piano, and aided with a little bit of psychedelic drugs—while the cutting “High Horse” is a truly danceable disco tune. And though all of these songs are precisely written, Golden Hour finds Musgraves playing around with her sonic palate, slowing down and stretching out whenever she wants; inspired by the likes of Bon Iver, she even employs a futuristic vocoder on songs like “Oh, What a World.” With Golden Hour, Musgraves proved that country music could still stretch and reach new heights of imagination—and that millions of listeners were willing to come along for the ride. Oh, what a world, indeed.

  • Same Trailer Different Park
    Same Trailer Different Park
    Same Trailer Different Park

    From right out of the gate, Kacey Musgraves knew exactly who she wanted to sing to—and to whom she didn’t. “I’d rather have 100,000 people who really get what I’m doing and like it for what it is than a million who can take it or leave it,” she told a reporter around the time she released her 2013 debut, Same Trailer Different Park. It was a strategy that paid in dividends for the Texas-born Musgraves, who got her start as part of a yodeling duo called the Texas Two Bits before she was even a teenager, singing at the inauguration of President George W. Bush. After a stint in Austin, Musgraves moved to Nashville, and quickly developed relationships with writers like Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, with whom she would co-produce her debut. And they immediately knew she was different. While 2012 brought bro-country and songs about beer, trucks, and the endless tailgate, Musgraves wanted more. She wanted to sing about real life and imperfect people, about loving who you want to love and about smoking the occasional bit of weed. And she wanted to talk about the real side of small-town existence—the pain, disappointment, and struggles that those party-centric radio hits by her male peers seemed to ignore. Same Trailer Different Park’s first single, “Merry Go ’Round,” did just that, offering up a plainspoken, truth-telling ballad that cut right through the bacchanal (it would eventually win a Grammy for Best Country Song). Tracks like “My House” pay tribute to the trailer park, while the silently strummed “It Is What It Is” confesses a desire to find someone who will do in the moment, instead of someone who will say, “I do.” But it was the album’s third single, “Follow Your Arrow,” that would make history. Not only did the song mention same-sex love—"Kiss lots of girls, if that’s something you’re into”—it was was co-written with McAnally and Brandy Clark, both of whom are queer. When “Follow Your Arrow” won Song of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards, Musgraves made sure McAnally and Clark stood right beside her—marking the first time two openly gay artists appeared on the CMA stage to accept their trophy. From that moment on, it was clear that allyship was something inextricable from Musgraves’ music—and that she was destined to become one of the most exciting and inclusive artists the genre had ever seen.

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About Kacey Musgraves

Kacey Musgraves knew from the drop that there were only two ways she’d make a career: Hers or no way at all. “There’s a lot of freedom when you do that from day one, because there’s no expectations on you,” she told Apple Music in 2018. That freedom has served the country singer-songwriter well since her 2013 debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, which established Musgraves—alongside artists like Pistol Annies and Chris Stapleton—as a quietly progressive voice in a conservative field, capable of tackling subjects like LGBTQ+ rights (“Follow Your Arrow”) or the hypocrisy of small-town life (“Merry Go ’Round”) without shedding her rootsy appeal. A native of East Texas, Musgraves (born in 1988) started releasing music in high school, making it to the reality show Nashville Star only to place seventh out of 10—an early sign that she was both of the industry and outside it. Her 2018 LP, Golden Hour, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year, was a country-pop psychedelic romance that steered even further from Nashville conventions—as on the sweet ’70s-sounding “Butterflies”— but established a genre-bending blueprint that changed modern country for years to come. When the relationship that inspired Golden Hour’s most heart-stirring tunes dissolved, Musgraves released her intimately set three-act album, star-crossed, in 2021, questioning the matter of her own freedom with quiet frankness through ballads like “camera roll” and the reflective pop single “simple times.” But on 2024’s breezy Deeper Well, Musgraves found her own mellow rhythm, forgoing whimsical pursuits in favor of meditation and a serene inner peace.

HOMETOWN
Golden, TX, United States
BORN
August 21, 1988
GENRE
Country

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