Kacey Musgraves Felt the Most Vulnerable Writing ‘Mother’ for ‘Golden Hour’

Though not even two minutes long, “Mother” is one of the most striking songs Kacey Musgraves has ever released. The sincere sense of melancholy and nostalgia Musgraves channels is in part the result of a particularly emotive acid trip that inspired her to pen what she says is the song she felt most vulnerable writing for her new album, Golden Hour.

“It's interesting, I'm a super emotional person, but I am not always amazing at showing my emotions, so you hear that in the first part of the song,” she expresses to Taste of Country and other media. Musgraves lets her complicated emotions pour through in every lyric of the gentle song, sharing her innermost feelings: “Bursting with empathy / I'm feeling everything / The weight of the world on my shoulders / I hope my tears don't freak you out / They're just kind of coming out.”

These compelling thoughts were triggered not just by the out-of-body experience she was in, but from a sentimental message she received from her mother in that moment.

"She's like, 'You'd be so proud of me, I've stopped biting my nails, I've let them grow out,’” Musgraves explains, telling her mother how proud she was of her accomplishment. “The way she responded just wrecked me. She was like, 'Ugly old hands, I can't keep the East Texas dirt off of them.’ And I started thinking about my mom's hands and the fact that she's created all this beautiful art; she's held me with these hands. You recognize your mom's hands more than anyone's, and mine even look like hers.”

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The result is a tender-hearted song that dives deep into the singer’s mind as she tries to process everything she’s feeling, revealing her emotions in the most vulnerable of ways.

"It did make me really nostalgic for past, present, future and my family," she describes of the experience of writing "Mother."

"I just started thinking about all this crazy hurt that's going on in the world, it was really heavy, and I was missing my mom at the same time. I started thinking about the cycle of mothers and the fact that I was sitting there in Tennessee missing my mom who was sitting there in Texas missing her mom. It just goes on and on."

Following the release of the critically acclaimed Golden Hour, Musgraves is set to cross the globe in late 2018 on her Oh, What a World Tour, which begins Oct. 21 in Amsterdam.

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