Kate Hudson Doesn’t ‘Overthink’ Strained Relationship with Dad Bill: ‘It's a 40-Year-Old Issue’ (Exclusive)

Kate Hudson is at peace with where things stand with her biological father.

The star was born to actress mom Goldie Hawn, 78, and the Hudson Brothers singer Bill Hudson, 74, but he wasn’t present for much of her life after divorcing her mother in 1982. While Hudson doesn’t really have a relationship with Bill, she’s connected with his other children.

“There’s nothing new there but love,” Hudson, 45, says in this week’s PEOPLE cover story. “I love him. . . . I just don’t overthink it. It's a 40-year-old issue.”

After Hawn and Bill divorced, she began dating her longtime partner, Kurt Russell, in 1983; the pair raised Kate and Oliver, along with Kurt's son, Boston, and Kurt and Goldie's son, Wyatt Russell.

Hawn and Russell’s 40-plus-year romance has taught Hudson an important lesson about love.

“Their strongest value is their dedication to that unit. They’ve been through everything together, and it’s such an amazing thing to see, especially as they get older, how beautiful their relationship is. It’s so loving and caring,” Hudson, who will release her debut album Glorious on Friday, May 17, says. “They’ve stuck with it. It’s like a very rare Hollywood story. They’re in it forever. It’s wild.”

Hudson — who is mom to sons Ryder, 20, Bingham, 12, and Rani, 5 — adds: “It says a lot about follow-through. I think we go back and forth. It's very easy, I'm speaking from experience, to say something's not working. And you got to try your hardest, try your best, but ‘Oh, we'll figure this out.’ But to actually follow through with each other through those moments is really powerful. And to be able to witness that as their daughter is just a beautiful thing to see now.”

Last month, Hudson opened up about Bill on CBS Sunday Morning, saying “I don’t really have” a relationship with him.

“But it’s — it’s warming up,” she added on the morning show. “There’s warming up with this all happening. But it’ll be whatever it will be, you know. I have — I have no expectation of that with my father, you know. I just want him to be happy."

More recently, on The Howard Stern Show, Hudson said she’s “done so much work.”

"I know him enough to know, throughout the years, that whatever it is that he carries, whatever it is that makes him unable to have the capacity to be our dad doesn't mean that he hasn't loved us from afar or tried his best,” she added on the Sirius XM radio show. “"I wouldn't be me if it wasn't for my dad.”

Indeed, Hudson has music in her DNA — and this week, she’ll fulfill her lifelong dream of releasing an album.

“I was like, ‘This is just a life well-loved,’ ” Hudson says of her genre-blending record Glorious. “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 Friday.