Kate Hudson’s not sure what took her so long, especially with all the music whirling inside her. Raised between Colorado’s mountains and Santa Monica and Malibu’s beaches, she came of age with radio that delivered everything from Pearl Jam to Pharcyde, Neil Young to De La Soul. And so many women -- from Madonna to Patty Griffin to Sheryl Crow – who captured all the emotions a young woman feels.

That hunger for musical expression from the woman who embodied the ultimate rocker’s muse in Cameron Crowe’s Oscar-winning Almost Famous runs deeper.

She says, “I have been writing music since I was a young girl. I always felt connected to music. I was always writing songs and little poems and lyrics that came to me, even though the house I grew up in was more of a theater house than a musical house.”

And she kept writing, living in the music. Never sure what to do with it, never quite sure how it fit into her busy, successful life. Music was just always, always there. “It was my outlet. It was always the place I found.”

Then came Linda Perry, who challenged Hudson. Not to finish what was, but to create songs from scratch.

Natural, easy, engaged, there’s both self-examination and celebration of self-flowing though her songs. An invitation to feel, touch, and even seek and find carnal pleasure, Kate Hudson understands the phases and stages of modern music in a way that’s fluid, but defined, honest, yet willing to leave it all at the door in the name of love.