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It’s fair to say that if Shaboozey hadn’t released another single, his place in history would have been assured.
He wasn’t the only black country-leaning artist to come to the masses with the guests who appeared on Beyoncé’s 2024 album Cowboy Carter, but none of them did anything more surprising. Released two weeks after his guest appearance on the album’s Spaghettii, his single A Bar Song (Tipsy) unexpectedly surpassed the success of Beyoncé, becoming the best-selling country of the year – more than 1.75bn streams counting Spotify – and for a while, the longest-running US No 1 collaboration of all time. He has received three names on The world The music awards, an event that is not limited to artists of color. The next album, Where I’ve Been, Ain’t Where I’m Going, was a continued successful attempt to combine hip-hop and country, two genres that have been around each other for a long time, producing recent hits such as Nelly and Tim McGraw’s Over and Over Again, Ludacrisson Dirt Road, and Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road; a badass, bro country rap version; it’s a deep underground version of hick-hop, a hidden world of Maga politics, party flags and festivals held in mud holes in Georgia. The song is still on the US chart, 112 weeks after its release.
Understandably, his success has made Shaboozey move fences for two years. The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales is a 20-track album, accompanying the three-part comic of the same name. It features a mid-range soundtrack: cinematic and orchestral, ambient and Pink Floyd-y, with David Gilmour’s twisted metal ringing. There is a story about the actors Jamie Foxx, Teyana Taylor and Sam Elliott, the latter going another way to solve the traditional problem with emotional albums: that the audience quickly loses the thread of the story and spends a lot of time listening to the music without knowing what is supposed to happen.
The world started making albums long before rock. Marty Robbins’ joint Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs were released in 1959, Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears in 1964 – and are the most prominent in the history of the genre. Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, the 1975 saga of a killer on the run, consistently voted the greatest album of all time; Many famous artists, including Emmylou Harris, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, have one of their records. You can see The Outlaw Cherie Lee as an effort to get out of the middle of the country, even if she has a famous Auto-Tuned guest recorded by the rapper Gunna on High Noon (“I spent a hundred on clothes / I have bad hoes,” she offers, perhaps not mentioning farm equipment). Cowgirl and Born to Die are two obvious – and, it has to be said, very beautiful – attempts to emulate the success of Shaboozey’s best song: “I got you another bar song,” he says in reference to the former. Meanwhile, Bullets and Blades, is a huge and incredibly beautiful group with Shaboozey singing a song with R&B star Kehlani.
Elsewhere, The Outlaw Cherie Lee is a world of her own: If I Were an Outlaw has a saloon-bar piano, Sweet Revenge goes straight to rock, while the closing track is a burst of folk music from Cowboy Streets of Laredo sung by Orville Peck. The album’s style is tight and funky, driven by finger-picking guitar and accented by fiddle. At their best, these songs are dark in the atmosphere and powerful – like Drunk’s – although sometimes it’s hard not to feel that part of Shaboozey’s USP has gone with his decision to bring down the influence of rap in his lyrics. He can wail with sparkling energy, but there’s a palpable joy when he returns to a hip-hop delivery, better than being in a thrashed bandit on Til Sunday.
However, as a manifestation of her eclecticism – or, if you prefer, the desire to be all things to all people – The Outlaw Cherie Lee works well. The music is brilliant, the stakes are higher than the critics would suggest, and there’s an impressive courage in his desire to draw R&B, soul and hip-hop artists into his country – apart from Gunna and Kehlani, there’s a striking change from Leon Bridges on Burn It Down. The larger story is well-maintained and well-maintained. Perhaps most importantly, this album doesn’t feel like the work of an artist whose career has been marred by big, unexpected and unrepeatable hits, but the work of an artist digging in for a long time.
What Alexis listened to this week
Mr Wa7t – The Recipe (Richard Norris Fitness Mix)
The original is great, deep, but the Richard Norris remix has turned it into a smooth, sunny Balearic: what’s needed right now.
