Kacey Musgraves revealed the title and theme of her next album, Golden Hour, in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly's "First Look" issue. Musgraves' fourth major label LP, and her first since last year's holiday-themed A Very Kacey Christmas, arrives in early 2018.
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In the interview, Musgraves teases a "trippy" twist to her charming story-songs about small town living and personal independence, listing the Bee Gees, Sade and Neil Young as musical reference points.
The new album explores the many facets of everyone's identity. "I was thinking about how there are different masks that we wear that represent different sides of us," she told Entertainment Weekly. "None of the masks are solely us, but they're all us. On this record, there's the lonely girl, the blissful girl, the new wife, the girl that's missing her mom, the angry girl, the sarcastic girl, the '60s-sequined Cruella de Vil with the beehive, the shy girl, the life of the party, the winner, the loser — they're all characters on this record. None of them alone are me, but the golden hour is when they all come together and you see me as a whole."
Musgraves also promises a helping of love songs inspired by her new husband and fellow musician Ruston Kelly. "I've never been one to write a love song and really feel it," she says in the same interview. "That probably sounds like the most depressing thing ever. [But] I'm coming off getting married and being in this golden hour of my personal life, where all these things are finally coming to fruition. I found myself inspired to write about this person and all these things he brought out in me that weren't there before."
Musgraves recorded at least part of the album in the studio above Sheryl Crow's horse stables. The usual co-writers, Shane McAnally, Luke Laird and Natalie Hemby, pitched in. Ian Fitchuk and the Silver Seas' Daniel Tashian served as Musgraves' primary co-writers and co-producers.
