Album Review – Kat Hasty’s “The Time of Your Life”

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#550.3 (Texas Country) on the Country DDS.

Who is Kat Hasty? Where is she from? What makes her tick? What’s her life story? And why should you care? You could try searching up some slick bio or media puff piece. Or you could simply listen to her debut full band album The Time of Your Life where it’s all spelled out in uncensored, heartbreaking, hilarious, poignant, and authentic songs portraying the rough and tumble moments of an up-and-coming performer from Texas.

Hasty is a perfect specimen of how you can take the girl out of the country or Texas, but you can’t take Texas or the country out of the girl, at least not one like Kat Hasty. When we talk about “authenticity” in country music, we don’t just mean resume points of time spent on farms and ranches, or where an artist is from. It’s about the amount of distance between what they live, and what they sing. With Kat Hasty, that distance is somewhere close to zero. These songs describe the episodes of her life like they were torn out of her diary, saucy details and all.

Rewind back to before and during the pandemic, and Kat’s acoustic album Drowning in Dreams, and specifically her song “Pretty Things.” The song caught fire and had some considering her the female version of Zach Bryan. So Nashville came calling, and as a single mother from a blue collar family from West Texas, Kat answered. Hasty’s dreams are as big as anyone’s, but the last thing she was willing to do is compromise who she is and what she sings to fit someone else’s expectations. So as she proclaims in the opening song, Kat determined “This ain’t the business for me,” and high tailed it back to Texas.

The Time of Your Life is unabashedly Kat as she overshares about her struggles with impulse control, failed love interests, and her utter inability to be anything but herself. “Breaking Up The Band” is based on actual events, specifically when she fell for her lead guitar player and ultimately Yoko Ono’d her own band. “The Best We Can” is basically an autobiography of her life where she says at one point, “I’m just white trash hiding in a Pendleton sweater.”


Though the sounds are mostly country with prominent fiddle throughout the album, The Time of Your Life truly fits into the Texas music mold where it’s unafraid to veer a little bit into rock and even pop, especially in the way some of the lyrics are rendered. Hasty is clearly pulling from a wide range of influences and delivers it all with a strong confidence in herself, giving the music a swagger.

But true to her brand, this album wasn’t produced by some big named personality. The songs weren’t worked over in writing rounds on Music Row. Instead, Hasty wrote all the songs herself, and cobbled together some mercenary musicians in the Dallas area to self-produce this record in spitball fashion. To be frank, the shoestring nature of the production comes across in the finished product, with some song ideas not fully expressed in the studio effort, and the album failing to create a cohesive sound for Kat that she can call her own.

But on the flip side, there is something endearing about the homespun nature of this album, and how it speaks to the underground and Outlaw attitude Hasty brings to her music, along with her devil may care approach to life overall. And even if the production isn’t slick, the songs and the sentiments come through starkly, including how you can hear Kat’s devilish smile imbued in the inflections of her voice. Hasty makes herself very hard to hate. There’s a folk hero appeal to her.

Kat Hasty became one of those unlikely overnight success stories during the pandemic by touching a nerve and catching fire on social media. Getting sidetracked by attempting to work with Nashville has created a bit of a hiccup in her career. But now she’s back to cultivating her grassroots with blistering honesty and by being unapologetically herself.

1 3/4 Guns Up (8/10)

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