The country singer-songwriter reflects on winning four awards last week, including album of the year for “Golden Hour.”
If you ask Kacey Musgraves — the country singer-songwriter who won four Grammy Awards last Sunday, including album of the year — how her week has been, you’ll get a pretty good idea of her default manner.
“ Mehhh,” she said playfully over the phone Friday evening, after a few days of letting it all sink in. “I’ve had better.”
Her tongue-in-cheek deflection spoke to the shock that a progressive, psychedelic-drug-using Nashville misfit from Texas could have beaten Cardi B, Drake and Kendrick Lamar for what remains the highest annual honor in music.
[ See how Kacey Musgraves made the “Golden Hour” song “Slow Burn.”]
“Golden Hour,” Musgraves’s third major label album, was critically beloved, but had barely been embraced by country radio — still the genre’s mainstream driver — and was far from a smash. Ahead of the Grammys, the album had totaled about 310,000 in sales, compared to many millions for the favorites in the top categories. Still, in addition to her first album of the year, Musgraves won Grammys for best country album, best country solo performance (“Butterflies”) and best country song (“Space Cowboy”), bringing her career total to six.
In Musgraves’s first interview since her Cinderella moment, the singer reflected on this year’s Grammys, her place in the Nashville scene and what’s to come. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Congratulations on a big night. How have you been celebrating?
Lots of R & R time. Definitely happy moments with the team, but also celebrating with food. Enjoying having some burgers — note the plural nature. My husband and I had some down time together — spa time, which is a way that I like to take a break. But I’m already back to a week of shows.
And how did you celebrate that night — did you go hard or just crash at the hotel?
I went really hard at Fatburger. I’m not like, hugely into an after-party scene, usually.
