Hook & Reel: Kacey Musgraves, ‘Golden Hour’ highlights

Welcome to Hook & Reel, a series showcasing music that’s guaranteed to catch your ear.

You have to wonder if Kacey Musgraves recorded the majority of Golden Hour with a little smirk – not at the expense of her listeners but more at herself. She spent her first two albums being country music’s beloved outlaw, penning brutally honest and at times even beautifully bitter songs about the reality of the world around her to old time country arrangements. She was musically-grounded in her genre, but she wrote far outside of its modern boundaries, with a pen as sharp and deft as the most seasoned of songwriters. Her pen stays deft with Golden Hour, but instead of dysfunctional small towns and pageant beauty queens, she pivots drastically and writes about love so pure it’s almost painful, enveloping every lyric in a dreamy, folk-pop paradise. But what makes Golden Hour so extraordinary is that even if it is a departure from Musgraves’ earlier work, it still unmistakably bears her mark. Instead of using her honey-coated, fluttering voice to add a needed layer of sweetness to her cyanide songwriting as she did in the past, she uses it to make her blossoming love as a newlywed even more intoxicating. And though she’s incorporated a slew of pop-centered elements into her instrumentation, her songs still feel stripped and grounded, where you can almost see her kicking up barn hay as she strums the mandolin in her jeweled, gold cowboy boots.

Each of the record’s thirteen tracks is immersive in its own way, but three of the album’s strongest offerings are laid out below:

Have you ever woken up way too early, early enough to watch the sun rise? You sit outside nursing a cup of coffee or possibly nibbling at some breakfast, and listen to the world around you inhale as everything is bathed in an optimistic glow. You ruminate on your existence in a way that is soft and serene; not overwhelmingly happy or sad, just quietly content that you’re alive. That’s what “Slow Burn” sounds like.

“Happy & Sad” is not the first song that’s been written about the push-and-pull between being guarded and opening yourself up to true love, but doesn’t Kacey Musgraves put it in a way that nobody else ever has before? Maybe it’s the way her songwriting sounds straightforward but artistically layered, emotions folding into each other so seamlessly you can listen to the song four times and feel four completely different ways. Maybe it’s her delivery, how she tows that line between madly in love and melancholy so flawlessly. Maybe it’s best not to overthink it, and just accept that Musgraves is one of the best songwriters of our generation.

“Oh, What A World” is a love song with an asterisk attached. The caveat to the wide-eyed love song isn’t that she’s bitter or pessimistic, it’s that she’s working through the final stages of shedding her perceptions of romance as a doomed practice and allowing herself to finally embrace the true love that she’s found. She’s joined by a metallic, vocoded harmony that acts as both the track’s intro and outro, and its juxtaposition with her breathless, starry-eyed adoration in the body of the track serves as a symbol of a young adult shedding their mental and emotional armor to co-exist with their soulmate. And that robot voice resonates heavily; even in its steely croon its loaded with heartache, awe and fear, eventually giving in to Musgraves sky-high, love-struck wonder.

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