I'm blown away. Kacey Musgraves just released her fourth album (if you count her Christmas album), Golden Hour, and it's a stunning album from the sultry, smokey soul. This will end up as one of my favorite albums this year, a must listen for all because it's so damn universal.

I was trying to find a comparison for this album because it's easy listening in the best possible way. You turn it on and do whatever you gotta do - run, walk, drive, party, have a drink or a smoke, talk, you name it.

In an album review by Rob Harvilla from The Ringer, he noted it was an album to smoke a joint to (as Musgraves notoriously loves to do - amongst some other psychedelics that clearly influenced the album), as you float away in the slow burn of Musgraves' music.

Back to the best comparison: Some might think of this as a dig AND OF COURSE IT'S NOT IF YOU REALLY KNEW ME, but the album reminds me (though a bit more country and twangy) of John Mayer during his Room For Squares days. Every song is beautiful, listenable, different, and buoyed by a flow that never gets too fast or lulls you to sleep. Songs have different tempos and keys and instruments, nothing is boring. There’s highs and lows and in betweens, Musgraves gets all my emotions, just as Mayer could do but Musgraves comes more authentic to me. Though Mayer obviously wins the guitar battle.

John Mayer even gave his own post two cents on the album on Facebook:

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Her voice goes straight to the soul. You stick to her siren in "Golden Hour," or her melodies in "Butterflies," or her balladry in "Rainbows," or her sexiness in "Slow Burn."

And you might think her voice sounds too perfect (or produced, as they say, like all the no talent ass clown pop stars who can’t sing but fourtunately have computers that fix their inability to sing and writers that fix their inability to pen a song). Well, I give you Exhibit A from her performance on Colbert, where she crushed it:

This album should be ingested whole and given a lot of time to sink in. It only gets better.

Enjoy :)