TEXARKANA MAGAZINE
I f you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Kacey Musgraves’ music, I highly recommend you grab your phone immediately, open up the music streaming service of your choice, and hit play on her 2018 Grammy-award-winning album, Golden Hour . It was the soundtrack to my life the entire year after it dropped, and apparently, the mark it made was significant enough for it to be the catalyst for this article I’m writing today, six years after its release. I’ve probably heard Golden Hour’s opening track, “Slow Burn,” over a thousand times by this point. But the words to this song never truly grabbed me up and slapped me across the face like they did a month ago while I was listening to the album again.
GOOD EVENING TXK COLUMN BY BAILEY GRAVITT
“I’m alright with a slow burn / Takin’ my time, let the world turn / I’m gonna do it my way, it’ll be alright / If we burn it down and it takes all night, it’s a slow burn.”
A slow burn? In this economy? The lyrics were confounding for me that morning. Could life really be the way Kacey is experiencing it in this song she wrote? Could my sleep-deprived, overthinking, caffeinated, ADHD, restless self truly ever be alright with a slow burn? The idea sounds so nice in theory. The thought of not rushing around like a chicken with my head cut off, slowing down, and stopping to smell the roses sounds lovely. But the what ifs in my head would not go down without a fight if I proclaimed “slow burn” to be my new mantra for life. I’m torn between two worlds. On one side is my current career in the frenzied, fast-paced world of social media management. On the other, are Saturdays brimming with laughter and aimless wandering with my friends, all yearning for more from life than what’s in front of us, without ever really gunning for any particular goal. Working in social media, everything is about what’s happening right now. What’s trending? What’s new? What just happened 10 minutes ago? What will be the talk of the town today and forgotten about tomorrow? What TikTok trend is going viral right now? My job, as a social media manager, is to hop on it immediately before it loses relevancy. Growing up during the rise of the digital age, I’ve always been conflicted between breathing in the moment that is in front of me or pulling out my phone to capture it first. My mom always jokes that there were “no private moments” in our household throughout my adolescence because I was filming everyone and everything non-stop, and sharing it all on social media immediately after. I’ve always enjoyed using my platforms to make people laugh. I used to fear the innate itch under my skin, believing taking things slower was really a subtle
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