It has been an excellent decade for women in country music, even if country radio continues to stubbornly ignore their music. Five of my top 20 albums are by women who are either country (or at least country-adjacent) artists.
One of the most critically-acclaimed of those records is Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, the Texan singer-songwriter’s third and best album.
The third song tied for 15th on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll is another Kacey Musgraves tune. She clearly hit a nerve with Golden Hour, at least critically. It hasn’t been a runaway commercial hit, at least not yet.
‘Space Cowboy’ was on of the album’s early singles and one of its standout tracks. Musgraves does a nice job mining the cowboy metaphor throughout, and the misdirection of “space cowboy” actually being “space, cowboy” is nifty.
Three songs tied for the 15th spot on Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop poll. One of those is ‘Shallow,’ the one element of A Star is Born that will definitely win an Oscar later this month.
Then comes ‘Slow Burn,’ the lead-off track from Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, which I already noted was the poll’s #1 album overall.
Miranda Lambert is my country music queen, sitting high atop a pedestal, out of reach of most singer-songwriters both inside and outside of the genre. She’s untouchable.
But if she has an heir apparent, it could well be Kacey Musgraves, who just released Golden Hour, her third straight album of delightful country pop and appears to be on a similar critical and commercial trajectory.
Meet Me In Montauk 