Texas Monthly

Golden-born Kacey Musgraves built her career upon the principle of authenticity. Marked as a “different” kind of Nashville star because she sang about weed and expressed her support for the LGBTQ community in lyrics and interviews, she shook the country music scene with a 2013 single that told her fans to “follow your arrow wherever it points.” She took her own advice for the next thirteen years, and it paid off: over 6.8 billion streams, nearly 3 million Instagram followers, four world tours, six CMA awards, and eight Grammys, including Album of the Year for 2018’s “Golden Hour,” her masterpiece of pop- and disco-influenced country. And now, a new era. 🪩✨🐎 “Middle of Nowhere”’s steel guitar, waltzy two-stepping rhythms, lyrics about cowboys and horses, and appearances by Willie and Miranda Lambert suggest that when Musgraves is just being herself—really, really just herself—we’re reminded that she’s really, really Texan. Read the full story at the link in our bio. 📸: @ramonarosales

Last year, Texas Monthly senior editor Aaron Parsley and his family were swept into the floodwaters of the Guadalupe River. Parsley’s first-person account of his family’s fight for survival and heartbreaking loss would go on to be read by millions. Now, he returns to the pages of Texas Monthly to share everything that happened after the flood. “Long-standing delusions broke apart like our house had, revealing truths about existence I’d never known. I started this journey in solitude but would end it with others—people I love and strangers whose paths collided with mine,” writes Parsley. Read his full story at the link in our stories or find it on texasmonthly.com. 📸: @danwintersphoto

Ryan Bingham hadn’t necessarily planned on collaborating with the Texas Gentlemen beyond a one-off set at Billy Bob’s in 2021, but he knew not to let the kind of musical chemistry that he felt that night slip through his fingers. He ended up inviting the band to join him for one-off concerts around the country in 2022. Every few weeks, Bingham would get together with the band whenever he was back in North Texas, and they’d meet up at a Fort Worth studio. “We didn’t go in there with much of a plan,” Bingham said of the 2024 sessions that became “They Call Us the Lucky Ones.” Before long, they were having too much fun–and sounding too good–to not record. “Before we knew it,” said Bingham, “we had an album.” “They Call Us the Lucky Ones” is Bingham’s first studio album in seven years and the first of his post-’Yellowstone’ era. It’s also his first record since his 2023 marriage to @hassieharrison , whom he credits with inspiring a lighter tone in his songwriting. “You got a lot of sad cowboy songs,” she told him one night. “You need some glad cowboy songs.” Read more about the album at the link in our bio. 📸: @eliastahan

Deep cupped, purple tinged, and petite, with beautiful ridges. The meat is surprisingly sweet. It looks and tastes nothing like the Gulf oysters you’re used to. But it is a Gulf oyster. The oyster farming industry was legalized in 2019, and the first cultivated bivalves were harvested in 2022. About a dozen farms from roughly Galveston to Corpus Christi are harvesting oysters, and diners are finally starting to see them on restaurant menus across the state. 🦪 Pro tip: Mid-to-late spring, before it gets too hot, is one of the best times to eat Gulf seafood—the summer heat can put stress on the oysters and make them less delicious. Get a taste for yourself at the link in our bio. 📸: @matt_conant

For the past eight years, writer Robert Downen has had an inside view of Southern Baptist life, leadership, and a community of survivors as they’ve dealt with fallout from the church’s abuse crisis. His recent story on the Southern Baptist Convention explores one man’s rise, rule, and downfall. You might not know his name, but Paul Pressler helped ordain the marriage between white evangelicals and the Republican Party, all while accusations of sexual abuse piled up. “Cultures are not formed or reformed overnight. And too many men had too much to lose,” Downen writes. It’s a story about power and what those who want it will do for it. More than anything, it is the story of what happens to those left in their wake. Read it in full at the link in our bio. 📹: @owenxbard

According to taco editor José R. Ralat, the slap comes into play during the cooking process. Cheese is melted on a flattop and a tortilla is laid on top of it. After a while, the fused layers are flipped to cook the tortilla a bit more—and then comes the signature move. The tortilla-costra is lifted from the cooking surface and slammed onto the griddled steak. There: You have dinner and a show. It’s not surprising that Monterrey’s Tacos Atarantados’ rich, provocatively named creation has shot to stardom and is now spreading across Texas. 📸: @tacotrailofficial

Three decades ago this spring, Spoon released its full-length debut, “Telephono,” on Matador Records. The album didn’t set the world on fire but was nevertheless “a building block on the way to Spoon becoming a fixture in every North American coffeehouse,” says Matador’s co-owner Gerard Cosloy. For Sean O’Neal, @spoontheband was his gateway to Austin. Hungry for more music after "Telephono," he ordered the vinyl-only compilation “Bicycle Rodeo” from the tiny Austin label Peek-A-Boo Records solely because it contained an alternate mix of Spoon’s “Idiot Driver” and a solo tune by Daniel’s alter ego, Drake Tungsten. The xeroxed zine that came with the record was a primer on the Austin scene, filled with shout-outs to clubs like Hole in the Wall and the Electric Lounge alongside blurry photos of cool-looking college-age kids watching Spoon play packed parties. This was a Texas he’d never seen before. “It was a scene that really wanted to be pure, whatever that meant,” front man Britt Daniel recalls, describing Austin in the mid-nineties. “There were shows every night. There were house parties all the time. It was a good moment.” 📸: Courtesy of Britt Daniel

Enter Kreuz Market, the historic barbecue joint in Lockhart, and you’ll see post oak logs burning next to brick smokers, beef-cooking fumes wafting to the ceiling, and employees in aprons portioning out orders. Look behind the meat counter and you’ll notice an array of implements that look like steel spikes—and that’s what they are. They’re also the trademark tools of Roy Perez, Kreuz’s pitmaster for almost forty years. The spikes are custom built. Perez has used them for nearly four decades to check meat for doneness by plunging the spike into a hunk and lifting it up. “I’ve never used a thermometer,” he says. Read more about his secret weapon at the link in our bio. 📸: @jeffwilsonphoto

Every Texan should try to visit old missions during their travels across the state, beyond the perennial field trip to the always-remembered Alamo. Adding stops to lesser-known missions breaks up the scrubby monotony of rural highways and might give you a renewed appreciation for our past. But these sites don’t always reveal much. Some are just a field and a historical marker. Some missions are mere rubble. And others, if you’re lucky, have low walls and arches or fuller replicas on their grounds. “You may not always be rewarded with much to see. I’ve often gazed at emerald-green grass where a structure, or its ruins, should have stood. In those moments, I try to put myself in that time and place. I imagine what the mission and its grounds looked like at their peak. I picture children playing and adults making music. I envision the sounds and smells,” writes @texasmonthly ’s José R. Ralat. “Then I trek onward in the hope of finding any fragments of the past that may help explain the present.” 📸: @christ_chavez

Wendy Watriss and Fredericka Hunter changed Houston. 83-year-old Watriss, who is stepping down from her work as a cofounder of the forty-year-old international festival known as FotoFest, created one of the most influential showcases for photography in the world. Hunter, who is 80, closed her Texas Gallery in February after opening Houston’s eyes to contemporary art for the past 54 years. “Maybe these two weren’t wildcatters or captains of industry, but their contributions to the cultural life of Houston and its global reputation as a destination for the arts are significant. Nor should it be forgotten that the particular character of this city—especially its go-for-it, never-be-afraid-to-fail aspect—shaped ambitious, creative women,” writes Mimi Swartz. Read the full story at the link in our bio. 📸: Courtesy of FotoFest, Gallery 98, Getty

The Monarch is hoping to carve out a unique space in downtown’s hotel scene, just down the street from stylish newcomers Kimpton Santo and the Plaza San Antonio and nestled among River Walk standards. While some properties upriver have struggled, Hemisfair seems to be thriving amid an influx of developments and major plans for a new Spurs arena. To help usher in that new era, and the tourism it will bring, the Monarch is going all in on luxurious details such as a full-service spa and a rooftop plunge pool and bar. Nods to the migrating monarch butterfly, the inspiration for the space, designed by San Antonio–based Overland Partners, carry throughout the sculptural lobby and the hotel’s three restaurants. They can even be found in small design elements like the whimsical, sloping headboards in the guest rooms. 📸: The Monarch San Antonio

The 2026 Austin City Limits Music Festival lineup, which dropped on Tuesday, features a surprisingly homogenous array of artists: a few pop megastars to dance to, a handful of nostalgia acts for fans who were in college during the Obama years, and, well, not much else. ACL’s identity has long been that of a festival where artists from a vast galaxy of genres perform alongside one another—ensuring that teens, parents, and grandparents all have a good time, whether they like their music sung, rapped, lyric-free, or in a language other than English. One could discover that they liked the sound of something they’d previously never sampled. For a lot of fans, this was part of the draw. It’s strange, then, for Texas’s marquee music festival to all but ignore several of the genres that made the state so musically relevant for so long, especially at a time when country and hip-hop remain culturally dominant. However, “fantasy booking a music festival is simpler than actually booking one, of course,” writes @texasmonthly ’s Dan Solomon. “It’s easy to suggest that Ella Langley or Kacey Musgraves should be headlining ACL this year, or that Toliver and A$AP Rocky were snubbed, without knowing how hard the event’s promoters may have worked to secure those acts.” 📸: @gettyimages