7/25/2023 0 Comments Golden hour time march 17th 2018![]() Musgraves’ songwriting melts seamlessly between celebration-in heart-eyed-emoji anthems like “Butterflies” and “Velvet Elvis”-and elegies for when those feelings start to dim. Golden Hour is an album-length ode to not having the right words, to being overcome by the moment and surrendering to it. “Is there a word for the way that I’m feeling tonight,” she asks in “Happy & Sad,” attempting to pinpoint the creeping melancholy undercutting an otherwise blissful evening. On a previous record, she might have provided a tour of the neighborhood that landlocks the star-crossed home-bodies in “Lonely Weekend,” or cracked a stoner joke about the “plants that grow and open your mind” in “Oh, What a World.” In the places where you’d expect Musgraves to land her punches, she sometimes offers just a wistful sigh.īut if the tension in her earlier work came from her sharp observations and underdog spirit, there’s something more complicated at play here. ![]() Musgraves includes precious few of the subtle details that made her 2013 breakthrough, Same Trailer Different Park, feel so instantly familiar. Tracks like “Love Is a Wild Thing” and “Oh, What a World” swirl around the positive messages in their titles in a state of euphoria. Sometimes, that familiarity belies the complexity of these songs. Instead, you’re left dazzled by the way her bold, drawling voice can cut through simple ideas-“Sunsets fade/And love does too”-like she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling. In the stunning single “ Space Cowboy,” she weaves in at least a dozen genre tropes without drawing any attention to them. In “Wonder Woman,” she confronts a partner’s unrealistic expectations and gives a simple counter: “All I need’s a place to land.” Throughout these songs, she finds one.ĭespite the grandeur of its music, Golden Hour offers Musgraves’ most understated songwriting, a refreshing evolution as stars like Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga accidentally turn Americana-pop into grim satire. While dynamic enough to house both the stirring, alone-at-the-piano fragment “Mother” and a full-on country-disco kiss-off in “ High Horse,” Golden Hour is alluringly cohesive, both lyrically and musically. The result is Musgraves’ most accessible record and her most ambitious, a magnetic, comfortable culmination of her pop and country instincts. She’s settled on enlightenment as a new resting state. For these songs of hope and wonder, she nods to meticulous folk epics like Beck’s Sea Change, or Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans if it was re-cut for an IMAX screen. On Golden Hour, everything sprawls and swells and gushes, a gaping sky that makes the sonic landscapes of her previous albums feel like mere set dressing. ![]() It’s like Musgraves’ life was given the season-finale treatment: a series of climactic turns that left her standing misty-eyed on a cliffside, bellowing “ I get it!” at the sunrise. There was a spirited Christmas record, a creatively charged acid trip, and a rustic country wedding. Since her last proper album, 2015’s Pageant Material, the now 29-year-old singer-songwriter has changed her perspective. ![]()
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