A couple of weeks before she would step onstage to accept the Grammy for Album of the Year, Kacey Musgraves was under the covers in the bedroom at the back of her tour bus, pondering the nature of the universe. She had a little unexpected time on her hands. A show in Chicago had been canceled, thanks to the polar freeze that had descended over the Midwest, leaving her stuck in the middle of a vast tundra with a buildup of tour adrenaline and nowhere to put it. She watched some “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” read a little “The Catcher in the Rye” and then lost herself down her favorite YouTube rabbit hole, a video genre in which someone mashes up tweedy old-school physics lectures with wonky electro beats. “It’s like if Daft Punk went totally science,” she says, “and I’m here for that.”

Later, she would stand in a diaphanous scarlet Valentino dress at the Grammys, giving a speech that could, given her tone and reputation, be read as subtly anti-authoritarian. “Life is pretty tumultuous right now for all of us,” she told the crowd. “I feel like, because of that, art is really thriving.” Musgraves is well known for her support of the L.G.B.T. community, her unabashed love of weed and her ability to turn a cutting phrase in her perfect Texas twang — particularly when she’s writing about the shackles of social convention. She started writing her winning album, “Golden Hour,” early in 2016, when Donald Trump was still assigning stinging nicknames to his Republican primary opponents, and began recording it just after Trump’s inauguration. She has tweeted in support of the Women’s March and in disdain of Eric Trump’s family-branded Christmas ornaments. She speaks with pride about the stack of detention slips her mother still keeps from her daughter’s time in the Mineola, Tex., school system: “I was always getting in trouble for, like, insubordination.” Add all that to the nose piercing that, as she famously sings on the rapturous single “Slow Burn,” made her grandmother cry, and you might expect her album to be a bit of a call to arms, a middle finger to a broken world.

Not so much. “I just got tripped out one day,” she says, musing on her inspiration for the album. “Thinking, Whoa, wait, we live in this world that seems so mundane, but at the same time that I’m sitting here, there’s things that are glowing in the ocean and eating each other — and there’s also northern lights and shooting stars and plants that grow and literally heal people.” She paused for breath. “And it’s all happening around us, you know?” Falling for the man who is now her husband — the singer and songwriter Ruston Kelly — was another part of the album’s genesis. “It’s sort of a love song to him,” she says, “but also to nature, the human race, Earth and why we’re here. We don’t know, and I kind of love it.”

In other words, this wry firebrand’s big statement on the state of the world — at a time when so many of the issues she has become famous writing about, like feminism and gay rights, are making daily headlines — is a metaphysical country-pop record more inspired by Carl Sagan than Willie Nelson. And just so we’re clear, Musgraves was on acid only part of the time. “It’s not like I was tripping my face off every day,” she clarifies. (After she told reporters that psychedelics influenced a couple of songs, including “Slow Burn,” it was all anyone wanted to talk about.) “It has only been a couple times. And very responsibly! Enough to be able to get outside of yourself and see a different perspective or point of view.”

What makes Musgraves such a resonant figure right now, in fact, is the way her response to a dark, anxious moment in human history is to move willfully closer to lightness, to stillness, toward the possibility of a world that comes in more colors than red or blue. When she talks about art thriving in this climate, she means it — just not in the same sense as, say, angry punks railing against the Reagan administration. What she means is that right now, the best rebellion involves turning off the hate and making space for hope. Or, as she puts it: “The [expletive] storm won’t last forever, and I want to make music that does.”

[Watch Kacey Musgraves turn country music psychadelic.]

I caught up with Musgraves in Wisconsin, on the tail end of January’s alarming deep freeze, which had temperatures in the upper Midwest dropping as low as minus 40. (I missed her in Chicago, where everyone was trapped inside, the streets vacant apart from the odd extreme-weather junkie taking photographs of ice floes.) Far from Valentino, she was, for the moment, in sweaty Victoria’s Secret workout tights and a fluorescent-green beanie, sitting straddle-style on the floor of the bar at a Madison venue called the Sylvee, having just finished a workout via Skype with Erin Oprea, a trainer to many of Nashville’s stars.

“O.K., so this is the one I put on my story yesterday,” she said, finding a clip she had posted to Instagram and showing me her phone. It was something called Symphony of Science’s “Quantum World,” a favorite among those space-disco physics videos. “Featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson,” she chuckled, reading from the chyron at the bottom of a related clip. I had indeed seen her Instagramming this kind of mysterious, late-night Discovery Channel-type stuff — the sort of thing teenagers once saw at the IMAX theater on a field trip after getting stoned. How did she get into it? “Oh, who knows, it was years ago,” she replied, then sang happily along to a remix that showed Morgan Freeman superimposed on a colorful tunnel of celestial light. One of the scientists’ 1970s professorial look, she pointed out, was “literally like what the band wears” in her stage show.

When Musgraves was 18 and a contestant on the reality show “Nashville Star” — she placed seventh — she had to fill out a getting-to-know-the-contenders C.V. Under the category of “dream vacation,” she listed “staying in a huge log cabin in the mountains, riding horses, hunting and four-wheeling with my friends.” The “craziest” thing she’d ever done? “Hunting for Bigfoot deep in the woods of East Texas. ... We didn’t get him.” That version of Musgraves — the one who cited Jack in the Box egg rolls and beer as her favorite foods — still appears at every show, even when she’s dressed like Bianca Jagger heading to Studio 54. She’s the one leading the ritual preshow group shot of tequila, taken from tiny cactus-shaped glasses she and her band have long been toting from show to show. And she’s the one hanging with me on the floor of a bar in Wisconsin, looking at videos by a user with the handle “melodysheep.”

And yet even in her early years, when Musgraves looked more the part of your average Nashville aspirant, in cowboy boots and blond highlights, there was always a kind of poise, an innate regality that set her apart. This, perhaps, is the other side of her East Texas grit — the one that manifests less as yee-haw joy and more as D.I.Y. conviction. “When it comes to art, I will not bend,” she says. “I won’t.”

Musgraves grew up in Golden, Tex., a town so small it doesn’t even have an elementary school. “A few hundred people,” she guesses, is the total population. It’s about 90 minutes from Dallas, and about six or seven miles outside Mineola, where Musgraves and her sister, Kelly Christine Sutton — a photographer, who shot the “Golden Hour” cover — went to school, and where their parents had a small printing shop. “Even at a young age,” Sutton says, “I always knew my sister would be known for her music. And not really on anyone else’s timeline. She would make it happen on her own terms.” It’s their parents’ model of small-town independence, Musgraves figures, that gave her a tend-your-own-garden will. “A large part of who I am comes from the fact that I never saw my parents have bosses,” she says. “They’ve never answered to anyone but themselves. And not in a baller way — like very small-business, check-to-check kind of a thing. But they made all their own decisions.”

Growing up, she had a Spice Girls poster in her room — Ginger, with her wild tattoo, made a strong impression — and listened to emo rock bands like the Used and Dashboard Confessional. But that wasn’t the sort of music she played. “I was part of this kids’ group called the Buckaroos that would meet every month in the Fort Worth Stockyards and would dress up in cowboy clothing and stroll the stockyards and learn instruments,” she recalls. “There were mentors there who kind of encourage kids to learn this old stuff.” By 9, she was writing her own songs and playing guitar; by 12, she was singing Western swing and yodeling at festivals on the weekends. Bookings and press kits were handled by her grandmother — the same one who later cried when Musgraves pierced her nose, and who referred to “It Is What It Is,” the singer’s melancholic ode to casual sex, as “the slut song.” “She’s a hoot,” Musgraves says. “She was wheeling and dealing.”

There was, of course, the requisite period in which a teenage Musgraves turned her back on the whole cowgirl thing. “I was like, Dude, none of my friends think this is cool. If they saw me I’d be superembarrassed. I’m yodeling, you know what I mean?” She rebelled — for a second. “I chopped off all my hair and was like: Suck on that! Now I can’t wear a cowboy hat, Mom!” (“You would not believe how upset my family was,” Sutton remembers.) But this rebellion turned out to be short-lived. By the time Musgraves moved full time to Nashville, at 19, she had realized “nobody really in the country world was embracing the hard-core roots of the genre.” But she had come to worship John Prine and Loretta Lynn — big-hearted, sharp-tongued, storytelling pillars of country’s outlaw roots who had risen up in the ’70s by staging their own insurgency against the bubble-gumming-up of the genre. “I randomly already had this superknowledge about all the old songs that came before me, and that style, the Western fashion,” Musgraves says. “I was like: I’m going to bring it back. I want to mix that in with something modern.” Prine himself is now one of her many admirers; he compares her to “a goofy Cinderella.” “She has a certain honesty to her voice,” he says. “She’s breaking down barriers.”

There’s a famous tale about Kacey Musgraves’s first big showcase performance for the Country Radio Seminar. This is a big-deal event in the business; its attendees are queen-makers in an industry in which success is still determined by access to radio airwaves. The story of her 2013 debut there smacks of a plotline on “Nashville” — appropriate, given that she co-wrote “Undermine,” one of the hits to emerge from the juggernaut TV series. You can easily picture the kind of episode Musgraves’s performance might have inspired. A young woman takes the stage at the legendary Ryman Auditorium, the so-called Mother Church of country, about to play the song that could make or break her career. We learn that she’s being hyped — thanks to her preternatural songwriting skills, good looks and the already-feverish crossover response to her first single, “Merry Go Round” — as the Veronica to Taylor Swift’s Betty: a sassier but potentially just as marketable product. As is the industry’s way, the corporate powers would like this rising phenom to be herself, but only within reason. They’d prefer she refrain from playing what will become her third single — the one with the lines about smoking joints and kissing girls — until after she can already be heard in every Walgreens in America. But the woman steps up to the microphone, leans into it a little and speaks: “I’m kind of a big believer in people doing whatever the hell they want to do, because I feel like society is probably going to have an opinion either way.” Then she starts strumming “Follow Your Arrow.” As she delivers its opening line — “If you save yourself for marriage, you’re a bore/If you don’t save yourself for marriage you’re a horr-” — the crowd gasps. Then she finishes — “-ible person” — and the audience laughs. A star is born.

It’s easy to wonder where Musgraves got the nerve. It’s one thing to admire your parents’ entrepreneurial spirit, and another to hold your own amid the chaos and pressure of the starmaking machine. For Musgraves, performing alongside Dolly Parton at the Grammys, winning Album of the Year, presenting an award at the Oscars — all of this is unequivocally her dream. But it’s also something she believes she could live without, and remembering this has become a kind of daily meditation, especially as the scope of her fame has increased. “I don’t get high off my own supply, you know?” she says, mentioning, by way of inspiration, Willie Nelson’s ability to welcome “Republicans, rappers, presidents, my grandpa, your grandpa, our hipster friends, me” without treating anyone as superior to anyone else. “You can be proud of yourself and excited for what you’re doing, and you could even really have a high level of confidence, without being a D-bag.”

In Musgraves’s mind, she made it the minute she signed her first songwriting deal, back in 2009, penning tunes that would be sold around Nashville to other performers. That was the day she realized she would never again have to work a job in which she dressed up as Disney characters for children’s birthday parties, one of many day gigs she had endured. “For the next few years,” she says, “I was like: Really? Wait, I can use my brain, sit on my ass and make a living?” When her current label first made her an offer to record as an artist, Musgraves turned it down; she was having a perfectly good time as a writer. She also knew she didn’t have real access to her own voice yet. “Those songs were fine for other artists,” she says. “Maybe they could be popular on the radio or something, but they’re not very me.”

By the time Musgraves eventually located her particular voice, it was already honed to a sharp edge. Her first hit, “Merry Go Round,” from 2012, is packed with the kind of mordant wordplay she’d be known for, conjuring a “same trailer, different park” world where people marry out of boredom and settle “just like dust” into small-town lives: “Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay, brother’s hooked on Mary Jane, Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down.” But after two albums and multiple world tours, Musgraves felt worn out by her own verbal cleverness. “Everyone hopefully knows I can flip a phrase by now, and I like that,” she says. “But I don’t want bumper-sticker songs.” It also concerned Musgraves that the refreshing directness with which she had addressed social issues might start to feel heavy-handed, even ideologically gimmicky. She is, as she puts it diplomatically, “noticing things about the world that I’m not happy with.” But when she started working on “Golden Hour,” it no longer felt right to address them directly. “Everyone that’s listened to any of my music knows exactly how I feel,” she says. “This record does kind of nod to some of the social and political things that are going on, but it’s just doing it in a different way. It’s not as linear.”

Back on her bus, in Wisconsin, after playing to a couple thousand freezing fans who arrived lit and ready to party, Musgraves decompressed again. Gone was the collection of products the singer uses to transform herself from the kind of girl her sister remembers Musgraves sometimes presented as in high school — “Converse, Dickies and black eyeliner” — to the flamboyantly feminine star who shares the stage with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” contestants. (“I have thought, Am I just doing this because it’s expected, or do I actually enjoy it?” Musgraves said to me earlier, while spraying her face with a mist of foundation. “And it’s like: No! I enjoy it!”) Now she was in slippers and a kind of housecoat, which I mentioned made her look approximately like my grandmother. “Let’s just say I also have a towel warmer,” she replied. She puttered around her kitchen, making mugs of ginger tea. Then she pointed out where the bus’s temperature controls were, and the cabinet where she keeps the melatonin gummies, and said good night.

Tucked away with her tasteful crystal collection in the earth-toned bedroom in the back of the bus — the first she has ever had, after touring for years alongside “15 other people” — there were any number of things might have turned her attention to. She could have looked at specs for the adult coloring book she’s designing with her mother, or maybe FaceTimed with her husband, Ruston Kelly, also on tour somewhere in the frozen Midwest. She might have scrolled through the looks her stylist had just sent through for the Grammys; she was still searching for something just right to match Dolly Parton. Or there was Musgrave’s common insomnia treatment, shopping on eBay: “I get down a little rabbit hole,” she told me, “ordering old toys that they don’t make anymore. Like dolls from the ’80s or ’90s. If I ever have a girl, it could be cute to give her P.J. Sparkles, or Makeup Beauty, or whatever, you know?” They would all be shipped to Nashville, where they’d be waiting for her when she got home — whenever that was.

“I mean, my 2020 is planned out,” she told me earlier. “I’m going to be putting another record out. I haven’t made that yet, so I need to write that and make that. Lots to do.” It is imposing, you’d guess, to have an album scheduled for release that you haven’t begun to record. “It’s scary,” she allowed. “You worry that the muse is not going to visit you again.” She reached for her lip gloss. “There’s no banking on it. So it’s odd that there’s an entire industry banking on it.” She’s not worried, though. Her latest idea showed up a few weeks ago — a low-key, “kind of like Bill Withers meets Sade” track she’s calling, for the moment, “Good Wife.” She likes its ease, she says: “It’s not trying too hard.”

Lizzy Goodman is a journalist and the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” an oral history of music in New York City from 2001 to 2011.

Devin Yalkin is a photographer from New York.