Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves turns seven today.

More than just a love album.

I was months away from embarking on my first journey living away from home in Texas for the summer, when Kacey Musgraves dropped her third album Golden Hour. At the end of my junior year I packed my four door Ford Focus to the brim and started the 18 hour drive down to Dallas. The route from Ohio to Texas runs through Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas til you hit Texas and then it’s another few hours to Dallas. As the miles passed I prepared for my southern summer by listening to a host of modern country artists: Maren Morris, Old Dominion, Johnnyswim, Brothers Osborne, Florida Georgia Line (I know, I KNOW), Thomas Rhett and of course, Kacey. On the afternoon I arrived it was 111 degrees.

While Golden Hour is a love album, and one of the greatest of this century I’d venture to say, at 21 leaving Ohio for the first time, it spoke to me in a context outside just romantic love. Driving the sprawling Texas landscape down streets and interstates I’d never seen, sweating my ass off in the ridiculous Texas heat, I felt something different. I learned a different way to live, a different direction my story could take–it became a guide book for where to look for love and wonder where you’d least expect it. Sitting at my desk QCing alt-text for battery product pages, tunneling down the massive eight lane Texas interstate or cruising through small town Texas backroads–Golden Hour was the soundtrack.

Kacey being a Texas girl, it was only a matter of time before I would start to obsess over her fabulous cunty cowgirl aesthetic. The disco pop country masterpiece that is Golden Hour would act as the conduit for a new kind of personal reverence for country music. There’s a lot to dislike in terms of the tropes that plague the genre as it stands today, but I can still find things to love: an acoustic guitar, a fiddle, a pedal steel guitar, big hair, rhinestones–all accompanied by lyrics lauding the important things in life like love and beer.

Or, in Kacey’s case, weed. Golden Hour opens with the perfect go with the flow anthem: the opening strums of “Slow Burn” are essentially a call to action to light up a joint, like you’re sitting around a blazing campfire and Kacey is the friend providing a woodland serenade. By the bridge you’re lying in the grass, staring up at the stars, sucked into her enchanting tale, accompanied by a haze of psychedelic, sitar-like strings. She sings: “I’m alright with a slow burn.” You’re reminded you could be, too.

Kacey smoking accessories – this grinder is still my tried and true 5 + years later.

“If you hear that song and you don’t like it, you’re not going to like the rest of this record, so stop listening, basically,” Kacey said of “Slow Burn” in a 2018 interview. It is the perfect start to a perfect album, one with a song for everything: love, adventure, heartbreak, uncertainty. On “Lonely Weekend” she sings of accepting the beauty in being alone; “Mother”, inspired by a mid-trip text from her mom, is a precious and pointed directive to call your mom, if you can; “Space Cowboy”, a midpoint ballad that feels like nursing a whiskey in a dank dive bar with Kacey crooning in harmony alongside a pedal steel guitar; then there is the disco-country anthem “High Horse”, an invitation to loud mouthed losers to ditch the ego or hit the road, there’s no room for self-importance in this here saloon, partner.

The whole album tells a story of letting go and giving in to the unknown, whether that be in your relationships, your job, your expectations of life in general. The things that matter most are probably out of our control anyway. Kacey expresses certainty about the uncertainty, confident that things we need will arise when we least expect it. Golden Hour is about all the highs and lows of falling in love—with a person, with love itself, with life. How if we can embrace the long game and give into the unknown, we will find exactly what is meant for us.

Now seven years old, Golden Hour stands the test of (Nat) time. It accompanied me through that first major journey of my early 20’s; then into my senior year of college where I was laden with uncertainty and emotions I still cannot identify even to this day; and then into my first year of post-grad, right before everything went to shit. Listening to it opens a window, blowing in the breeze from a time of change, where I was really in love with my friends and with independence and figuring out who I could be. Golden Hour plays and I see rainbows, I remember lying on the floor of my bedroom high off one puff of bad weed, I remember being content.

The Golden Hour tour in Cleveland, 2019

I went to see Kacey three or four times during the Golden Hour album cycle. I loved being immersed in her world if only for a couple hours, like being awake in a dream. I took on the mammoth crowd at Lollapalooza just to see her, and while I can confirm that is something I will not be doing again anytime soon, I couldn’t help but be moved by this massive crowd standing in watch as Kacey sang:

The sky has finally opened

The rain and wind stopped blowing

But you’re stuck out in the same old storm again

Let go of your umbrella

Cuz I’m just trying to tell ya

There’s always been a rainbow hanging over your head

The closing track of Golden Hour sums up the album in its entirety: life is not so black and white, but a rainbow of emotions, events, highs and lows. The lows can be unbearably low, but if you can only keep going, the glow at the end of the tunnel will welcome you with open arms.

A little rainbow hangin’ over my head

Golden Hour was formative for me in ways evident only in hindsight. Symbolically the number seven is representative of transformation, challenge and growth. Listening to Golden Hour now, I may be even more lost than that 21 year old leaving Ohio for the first time. She was so brave! Can I be too?

Golden Hour assures me the answer is yes. Wonder, possibility and peace exist, and in a different flavor for every season of my life. I am still learning how to be alright with a slow burn. I could probably cut back on the ganja ala Deeper Well era Kacey–maybe in another seven years.

Now, I move through California sunshine and Pacific coast breezes, but when I press play on Golden Hour, I’m back in the thick Texas heat. Could I have known seven years ago I would be here? I don’t think so, and who’s to say what another seven will hold. Oh, what a world.