I need to talk about Kacey Musgraves

Ms. Musgraves in the official music video for “High Horse” (insert cowboy emoji approx. a million times here)

Country music is having a moment. Or, more accurately, a revolution. Currently, Lil Nas X’s record-breaking “Old Town Road” remix with country music’s godfather Billy Ray Cyrus has been No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 18 weeks, making it the longest running No. 1 hit in Billboard’s history.

But this particular hillbilly renaissance isn’t merely signaling the return of country music’s popularity; it’s expanding it. The so-called yeehaw agenda has infiltrated the world of memes, black Twitter and just about every trendsetting corner of the Internet, and it has so with the help of Lil Nas X, Solange’s rollout of When I Get Home and the rising stardom of multi-Grammy Award-winning country singer Kacey Musgraves, who apparently appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race wearing what appears to be a Bobbie Gentry wig.

I knew who Kacey Musgraves was before the 2019 Grammy Awards where she won 4 out of the 4 awards for which she was nominated, including the night’s biggest prize, Album of the Year (for her third album Golden Hour). Well, I knew her name. And that she’s a country musician. So when I’d been informed that she won Album of the Year, I was confused. I thought for sure Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, the best album released in 2018 in my view, would take the prize. So as I’m wont to do, I hopped on the old Twitter dot com to see what the fuss was with this Kacey Musgraves, and I happened upon a video of her performance of her new single “Rainbow,” an ode to the LGBT community and anyone who struggles with their mental health.  

This was the first time I’d ever seen what she looked like. Standing in front of a duochrome piano, she wore an off-white mock-neck gown, her long dark hair a la Cher neatly gathered back. She looked like Miss America. At the risk of sounding superficial, her beauty was the first draw. And when she sings the song’s soul-baring chorus — “The sky is finally open, the rain and wind stopped blowing / But you’re stuck out in the same old storm again / You hold tight to your umbrella, well, darlin’, I’m just trying to tell you / That there’s always been a rainbow hanging over your head,” — I felt a biscuit-sized lump in my throat.

Oh. I get it. (But more on that later.)

To say I was blown away by this performance would be like saying peach-pear La Croix is good — a rude understatement. (For the record, peach-pear La Croix is actually water in drag.) What resulted thereafter was nothing short of a burgeoning love for this singer who seemed to be singing to me and me only; as far as I’m concerned my time on this precarious planet is marked by the time before I listened to Kacey Musgraves and after I listened to Kacey Musgraves. 

In case you don’t know who Ms. Musgraves is, it’s okay. I didn’t really either until a few months ago, and what I’ve learned is that she’s a 31-year-old country singer and songwriter from Golden, Texas who has really branded herself as a maverick of the genre. Save for Dolly Parton, the Dixie Chicks and a few Shania Twain songs, I’ve always regarded country music as conservative American honky-tonk which, in turn, felt unrelatable and unattainable to me. Like many, the words “country music” were pejorative to me, the freedom fries score for a socially backwards sect of mostly white Americans who represent and embrace toxic American exceptionalism.

And when I came upon Ms. Musgraves and saw that she was a brazen, pot-smoking, openly and actively LGBT-friendly artiste who may very well be the master of cover songs, I was pleasantly surprised and a little embarrassed of my assumptions about her and the country music community at large. (Most recently, Ms. Musgraves addressed the back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio during her set at Lollapalooza, calling for the nation’s lawmakers to “fucking do something.” She’s also been tweetin’.) Mildly similar to the Dixie Chicks’ controversies in the aughts, Ms. Musgraves dares to unapologetically challenge the cultural agenda of country music, expanding her mission statement which, in turn, has expanded her fanbase. (The only difference here, of course, is Ms. Musgraves has the advantage of having achieved prominence in a slightly more progressive zeitgeist and, therefore, avoided the flak the Dixie Chicks received.)

Right off the bat, her voice drew me in. Casual, yet spirited. Spunky, yet grown-up. She exudes an assertive, authoritative yet soft, vulnerable femininity that feels like a protective older sister who shares her weed with you but only lets you smoke with her. Her amiable East Texas twang that is both never exaggerated to make her seem more country or never intentionally smoothed out as an attempt to code-switch. She’s self-assured, a clarion call for every woman who’s ever felt like they don’t fit into any kind of mold but struggles to figure out who she’s supposed to be, when in reality there’s never a definitive answer and the beauty in being a woman lies in constant growth that occurs no matter your age. She resonates with the confused and vulnerable to remind you that, hey, even if you think you’re not, you are doing great, and for whatever you’re trying to achieve, there is no rush. Sometimes the deadlines we set for ourselves are arbitrary and that there is no shame in taking time in recouping one’s self. Ultimately everything is going to be okay, and it’s up to us whether or not we want to step outside the little tunnels we construct for ourselves and realize life isn’t so bad. (She even hints that, sometimes, tardiness can be fun.)

Going back to her multiple Grammy-winning third studio album, Golden Hour, I noticed a brand shift in Ms. Musgraves. Her first two albums, Same Trailer Different Park and Pageant Material, were punchy, rebellious and pushed the envelope in the country Establishment as a gifted, daring story-teller. They told stories of the delicious follies of youth, the enormous potential in our ever-expanding culture and embracing the differences in each and everyone one of us. Our journeys are singular, and mutual exclusivity is a myth.

Although these first two albums were critical triumphs, it isn’t until Golden Hour that you get the sense that this is a woman slowly achieving what all artists in this age of tight studio contracts and narrow definitions of marketable music want: creative control. For her third album, Ms. Musgraves traded in the denim and gingham for sequins and taffeta to create a bright, technicolor dreamscape that feels both fun and grown-up at the same time. Golden Hour is Ms. Musgraves’ finest achievement so far, delivering genre-bending tracks with complex, meandering melodies accented with her signature natural, sharp wit that feels so fresh in an era of music drowning in overly-workshopped pop “hits.” She appeals to the nostalgic, capturing the glamour and decadence of 1970s country in “Velvet Elvis” and “High Horse,” and at the same time brings up contemporary takes on emotions and mental health in “Happy and Sad” and “Rainbow.”  

Noticeably, Golden Hour has more love songs in it than her first two albums but that doesn’t mean strictly romantic love. Golden Hour is, indeed, a love letter with multiple addressees: her new husband, her mother, the world and the innocence we all still hold in ourselves regardless of the heartbreak, the pain, the tragedy. Listening to Golden Hour feels like being stoned and walking on the yellow brick road towards Emerald City with the love of your life, and I can’t think of a better music listening experience. Through it all, Ms. Musgraves encourages us to seek personal fulfillment whether that be with a significant other, with a group of friends, with your family or with yourself and only yourself.

A few weeks ago, I attended a screening for the movie Blinded by the Light, which is about a Pakistani-British kid who becomes enthralled and obsessed with the music of Bruce Springsteen. On a lark, he listens to “Dancing by the Dark” and is immediately thrown into an emotional whirlwind because he feels seen unlike he’s ever felt seen before. When I first heard “Rainbow,” I didn’t go out and dance in the streets like the kid did in the movie did, but I did listen to it over and over and over again because it articulated feelings and a message about recovery that I hadn’t been able to articulate before, and so simply. The idea that, no matter what we’ve been through, we are always worthy of recovery, safety and self-love and capable of changing the ways in which we see ourselves amid emotional turbulence.

My experience with depression is multi-layered that branches out and manifests itself into different attitudes and behaviors. It’s chaotic. Jarring. Sometimes it’s mute but rapidly moving at the same time. At times, unintelligible. It makes no sense. Everything moves at warp speed down a confusing, colorful emotional corridor, and it feels like the gondola scene from the 1971 classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a dense, dark, deafening thunderstorm of dangerous, monochromatic visions that further complicate recovery and my perception of reality, making it, quite literally, difficult to breathe and to see. So what do you do in that situation? You defend yourself. To use the song’s lyrics, you clutch your umbrella, caging yourself from the elements behind a thick shield because you know if you step out of it, you could get struck by lightning. You are in survival mode.

But then you realize something funny. The storm has long past and the sun is up. Recovery is always within reach. You never lose the ability to love yourself, but sometimes we forget and sometimes it’s as easy as looking up. And, look. None of this is to say that a single song miraculously rectified my mental health. Or that Kacey Musgraves is a prophet and she completely shifted the way I look at the world. And that’s not what Ms. Musgraves was aiming for, either. There’s no way to eradicate thunderstorms  — that’s not how nature works. That’s not how recovery works either. Deep-seated depression doesn’t just go away. It’s a sickness that will flare up from time to time, and the important piece of that is management and remembering that, like thunderstorms, there will be a rainbow at the end of every bout of darkness. Or rather, it never left. It’s just waiting for you to notice.