The star got her big break as an actress — and earned an Oscar nomination — playing band groupie Penny Lane in the 2000 drama from writer-director Cameron Crowe.

“I think [he] connected with the fact that I loved music and saw that in me, but he really blew the lid open for so much music for me. I was 19, and he just filled me with all this great music that I’d never heard,” Hudson, 45, says in this week’s PEOPLE cover story. “That was the beginning of everything for me.”

Now, more than two decades after the film’s release, Hudson is enjoying a full-circle moment: She dropped her debut album, Glorious, on Friday, May 17.

“I do see everybody’s response on Instagram, and there were a couple of things on there that just cracked me up. People are so funny,” Hudson says. “Somebody said something like, ‘It was Penny Lane the whole time.’ I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so funny.’ It makes me happy that people connect to that and then are enjoying that I’m making music. That’s so nice.”

And Hudson’s Almost Famous character actually served as a north star as she worked on her album.

“Kate should have led with music — she is such a rock star,” legendary songwriter Linda Perry — who collaborated on the record —says of Hudson, who “reminds me of old rock and roll. We talked about making a record that Penny Lane would have made. I believe it was captured.”

And as she performs the music live, Hudson would like to reunite with her Almost Famous costar Billy Crudup, 55, who played rising rocker Russell Hammond in the film.

‘That movie is one of the great music movies of all time, and everybody in that film loved music. I was just thinking, Billy still plays guitar. I was like, ‘I’m going to get him onstage. I’m going to make him do this,’” Hudson says. “ I was thinking, wouldn’t that be so fun for Billy to actually play guitar? I feel like an audience would love, would freak out.”

Hudson decided to pursue her music dreams amid the coronavirus crisis.

“I was like, ‘If I don’t do this, it’ll be a great regret,’ ” she says of an epiphany she had during the COVID lockdown. “Sticking to status quo is not how I’ve ever lived my life. I’ve always been fearless in the decisions I’ve made, whether it is in relationships or in career, but this was the one thing that I was so afraid of. It’s like I switched something in my brain, and I was like, ‘I’m just going to do it. F— it.’”

The Glass Onion actress also worked on the album with her fiancé, musician Danny Fujikawa, 37. The pair share daughter Rani, 5, and Hudson is also mom to songs Ryder, 20, and Bingham, 12.

“I was like, ‘This is just a life well-loved,’ ” she says of the album. “Through all of the highs and the lows, then all the stuff that comes with what it is to love a partner, your friends, your children . . . What a glorious thing to have so much love.”

For more on Kate Hudson, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere now.