Shaboozey Rides Again: Inside His Ambitious New Era

S
haboozey needs a tissue. Unfortunately, we’re on a postage-stamp-sized stage in a country bar called Losers, in the middle of the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, doing a live interview with lights, cameras, and 100 or so invited guests in front of us, and a casino full of rowdy gamblers behind us.

There is not, however, a box of Kleenex.

The country music trailblazer started crying after I asked him to reflect on what his history-making Grammy win meant to him, not as an artist, but as a son and grandson. Back in February, Shaboozey became the first Black man to take home the Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance, for “Amen,” a collaboration with the rapper-turned-country-singer Jelly Roll. Backstage in the press room at the Grammys that night, he broke down.

“I cried so much then because I really felt it all. It was just like…I might cry right now, y’all. Hold on,” he says now, his voice cracking. “Thinking about all the struggle and the pain that our people, my people, Black people, Nigerian people… To feel like I was able to be a part in some little way of Black history was just… It was a lot.”

Shaboozey’s milestone Grammy victory happened to fall on the first day of Black History Month. Just thinking of the moment has once again opened the floodgates.

I offer him my handkerchief, which, after years of heeding my father’s advice to always carry one, has finally come in handy.

“Thanks,” Shaboozey asks off-mic, dabbing his eyes. “Can I keep this?”

A FEW HOURS BEFORE our live interview, the man born Collins Obinna Chibueze to Nigerian immigrants is sitting quietly in his hotel room, 10 stories above the casino floor. Below him, drunken partiers are stumbling back from a day in the unrelenting sun at the MGM Grand’s pool, many of them carrying inflatable tubes, and nearly all in various stages of undress. One guy in a hospital gown is being escorted somewhere by security.

But Shaboozey, dressed in head-to-toe denim with brown suede boots, his dreadlocks hanging loose across his back, is thinking about his mother. Specifically, the 31-year-old is worried about how she’ll react to a new tattoo he recently had inked on his left hand — a skull in a cowboy hat, with the words “Outlaws Never Die.” “She hasn’t seen it yet,” he admits, extending his hand for me to take a look.

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Shaboozey became a name known to everyone from moms to teens on the strength of his 2024 hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” a massive crossover smash that, to date, has more than 1.7 billion streams on Spotify and has been certified diamond. Just a few weeks before its release, he received an endorsement from no less than Beyoncé, who featured the then-unknown singer-rapper on her country foray, Cowboy Carter. He scored a Grammy nomination for his work on the LP, and four for “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” including Song of the Year and Best New Artist. Now he’s poised to release a new album, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales, a concept record set in the Old West, due out July 31 on American Dogwood, Shaboozey’s imprint with the label Empire. It’s a bold, thrilling listen that underscores just how much unbridled creativity “Boozey,” as friends call him, brings to country music.

“My creative director yesterday was like, ‘You’re running a real risk [by] doing this concept album. You’re demanding long-term attention from people in a short-span economy. You’re asking them to come on a real journey with you that’s going to take maybe years for them to understand,’” he says. “It was a really eye-opening thing for them to put those things in perspective.”

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Shaboozey flew to Vegas this afternoon from Los Angeles for both the Academy of Country Music Awards and his first-ever podcast interview — onstage with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now. After waking up and having waffles for breakfast, he called his team to make a last-minute change to his red-carpet wardrobe for the ACM Awards. The fashion-forward artist wanted to ditch the white racing jacket he had initially selected in favor of something that nodded to The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales. He ended up in a full-length black-leather duster and cowboy hat, as if he just walked through a set of swinging doors.

“Clothes have a story. They’re time capsules,” he says. “Just putting on clothes is like art to me.” Today he’s also sporting four rings above his new tattoo, vintage biker-club jewelry that he bought from his friend, an Americana dealer. The desk holds an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the whiskey brand that Shaboozey turned into a chorus in “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and a few cans of Liquid Death water. His olive-green newsboy cap, with a silver thunderbird pin on its peak, is tossed on the bed.

If an earlier generation of outlaws like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings made their names by putting some distance between themselves and Nashville, Shaboozey has found his own way of dodging Music City and all that it represents. In his case, he’s chosen L.A. as his base; while still an entertainment industry hub, it’s worlds away from Music Row and its cookie-cutter star-making system, and that’s important for what he has in mind. There’s more creative opportunity in L.A. for his cinematic brand of country and hip-hop, which he expertly blended on his breakout full-length, 2024’s Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, and pushes to the limit on his new album.

Shaboozey has called L.A. home since moving west in 2016 from his hometown of Woodbridge, Virginia, but it’s impossible to separate his blend of musical styles from the geography that raised him. Woodbridge is close enough to Washington, D.C., to absorb some of its metropolitan culture, and a few hours east of the Appalachian mountain range, where country and bluegrass sounds abound. Pharrell and Missy Elliott came out of Virginia; so did Patsy Cline and Old Crow Medicine Show. Shaboozey describes the region as a melting pot and says it gave him a blank canvas to define himself, even if it was a bit sheltered.

“The beauty of a place like Northern Virginia, where I was from, is you weren’t really required or expected to be anything. You go to school, you play sports, you skate, and you do whatever it is,” he says. “I was in my own world, and we didn’t know about the outside world. I didn’t know there was a Nashville, where everyone’s wearing cowboy hats and singing country music, and playing the dive bars. I didn’t know that in California there was a scene.”

Eventually, he dug into local music history and learned that Cline was born, and is buried, in nearby Winchester, Virginia, and that Emmylou Harris graduated from Gar-Field Senior High School in Woodbridge, just like him, and regularly made trips to the nation’s capital to perform. “She met Gram Parsons in D.C.,” Shaboozey says of Harris’s cosmic-cowboy singing partner. “To know that country music had roots in D.C. and Maryland, it was freeing.”

There was no big-bang moment of country music discovery for Shaboozey. He was introduced to artists like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers by his father, who devoured country songs after immigrating to the U.S. from Nigeria in his early thirties. “I would hear him say ‘Kenny Rogers’ in a very thick, West African accent. He just really was in love with it all,” Shaboozey says. “But for me, there was no real pushes from anybody, it wasn’t a big revelation. I just heard the music and it resonated with me, and my story, and my voice. Wanting to find my own identity led me to start singing over acoustic guitars, and then when I’d listen back, people were like, ‘It’s kind of country.’”

Born in 1995, he also came of age listening to 2000s hip-hop and R&B. In a bit of foreshadowing, he fell in love with Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé, and couldn’t get enough of “Irreplaceable.” “I used to sing that song every time it came on the radio,” he says. “I was screaming it.”

Shaboozey found he had a natural gift for marrying the beats and lyrical flow of hip-hop with country signifiers, and he turned heads with early songs like “Jeff Gordon,” about the NASCAR driver, “Cabela’s,” about the hunting-and-fishing outfitter, and, “Beverly Hills,” whose video teased an early obsession with Old West cowboy imagery. But it was “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” that exploded. Built around an interpolation of J-Kwon’s 2004 house-party hit “Tipsy” and an acoustic strum-clap rhythm, the song became a cultural moment. It hit the country charts first, before jumping over to the Hot 100, where it spent 19 non-consecutive weeks at Number One, tying a record set by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” until Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” came back and usurped them both.

Shaboozey recalls vividly how quickly “A Bar Song” caught fire upon its release on April 12, 2024.

“Within the first 10 minutes of it coming out, it was having 100,000 streams on Spotify. My team, my managers, were making bets: ‘Oh, it’s gonna get a million in a week!’ and I’m watching it, and I’m like, ‘This is about to get a million in 24 hours,’” he recalls. “It kept climbing, and I just rode the wave.”

Shaboozey kept the momentum going with the ebullient “Good News,” another country Number One, and with “Amen,” the chart-topper that would later net him that historic Grammy. (The Pointer Sisters were the first Black artists to win Best Country Duo/Group Performance, in 1975, when the award had a slightly different name; Beyoncé won in 2025 with Miley Cyrus; but a Black male performer had never taken it home until Shaboozey.) He sprinkled in features with fellow country-rapper BigXthaPlug and the country-grunge firebrand Stephen Wilson Jr. among his own singles, and continued to gain notoriety from the most high-profile collab of his career: two songs on Cowboy Carter.

“Wanting to find my own identity led me to start singing over acoustic guitars, and then when I’d listen back, people were like, ‘It’s kind of country.’”

Shaboozey and I met for coffee in 2024, just before Beyoncé revealed her album’s track list. At the time, he was keeping it a secret that he had worked with her at all; he still didn’t know if his contributions, on the swaggering “Spaghettii” and the frenetic “Sweet Honey Buckin’,” had made the final cut.

He found out he was on the album by reading the track list online.

“I recorded two of those verses, and when it came out, she didn’t change a single thing, not an ad lib, nothing,” Shaboozey says. “She allowed me to just be me on that project. It really was motivating: ‘Yo, Beyoncé cosigned me!’ She gave me this push and was like, ‘Run!’ And I was running as fast as I could.”

Michael Trotter Jr., of the Grammy-nominated country duo the War & Treaty, says Shaboozey represents two important things for country music: retribution and forgiveness.

“He brings retribution, to say, ‘I told you we belong here, and I told you we could do it in a big way,’” Trotter says. “It was really cool to see this young Black figure come and take over that way. But Shaboozey also represents forgiveness. Some people will say, ‘That’s not country music,’ but Shaboozey comes with no judgment. He comes with open heart, open mind, and open arms, and he’s like, ‘I just want to tell my three chords and the truth.’ He is the American forgiveness story. He is the son of our ancestors that are coming back and saying, ‘It all belongs to us all, man.’”

Flush with creative capital from the success of “A Bar Song” and the endorsement of Beyoncé — and after playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption, a Western video game — Shaboozey  decided to raise the stakes and record an Old West concept album about a woman out to settle the score with the gang that killed her lawman father. The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales plays like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, Shaboozey’s way. There are interludes and narration provided by some big-name actors, Wild West sound effects mimicking galloping horses and stagecoaches, and a posse of guest vocalists. (The LP ends with a cover of a traditional cowboy ballad sung by a country music Lone Ranger.)

Shaboozey, who cites Pink Floyd’s surreal The Wall as one of his favorite albums and movies, had been ruminating on the idea for more than a decade. He took a stab at a country concept in 2016 with an album he refers to as Wrangler. Ultimately, he scrapped that project and went on to release the similarly titled but more rap-based Lady Wrangler in 2018.

“It was always my dream to put all the things I love about movies and music and stories into one cohesive body of work that I felt like people in today’s current music landscape aren’t really doing,” he says. “The Outlaw Cherie Lee came from my love for strong female protagonists. Quentin Tarantino is one of my favorite directors. He did Kill Bill with Uma Thurman, Jackie Brown with Pam Grier.”

Shaboozey sees himself as poking at the status quo of male-centered cinema. There’s no discernible “good guy” and “bad guy” in The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales, and, like in those Tarantino films, the protagonist is a woman.

“It’s a revisionist Western challenging the norms of what you see in Westerns,” he says. “It’s about this woman wanting to get revenge against a group of people who, honestly, are trying to do what they feel is right. A group of people who have been discarded and are just looking to survive, looking to fight back.”

Things get complicated for Cherie Lee when she finds herself falling in love with one of the men she’s hunting.

Shaboozey admits there’s a little bit of his own life story in the album.

“I was thinking about my past relationships with people I loved, and getting backstabbed, and still loving the person that backstabbed you,” he says. “It all went into this project.”

But, like Cherie Lee, does he seek revenge?

“I already got it,” he says, choosing not to elaborate.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SHABOOZEY,  however, is that he’s far too kind to enact vengeance. He asks permission to swear in your company, earnestly seeks your take on the week’s music trends (“Why do you think so many artists are releasing albums this summer?” he asks), and, in conversation, takes pains to credit artists who inspire him, like the Music Row songwriter and genre-bending solo artist Ernest (“He’s a cold rapper,” he raves) and Stephen Wilson Jr.

Spying Wilson in the crowd at Losers, he shouts him out and casts a beaming smile. The pair shared the stage at last year’s CMA Awards, performing their collab “Took a Walk.”

“I do feel supported, and blessed to be who I am, to be an African-American in this space. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“He comes from a small town in Virginia and wears that proudly, but he went a long way away from home to find out who he was,” Wilson says. “He has a multilayered identity to him, and it’s a very welcome addition to country music. The Appalachian Mountains roots seem to be apparent in his music, but he has a totally different spin on it. He’s also had a lot of influence from hip-hop and pop music, and spent a lot of time on the West Coast. But in a beautiful way, it seems like he landed where he left. You can taste the cast iron in the country — it’s got all this flavor.”

The six-foot-two-inch Shaboozey took his nickname from the way his football coach mispronounced “Chibueze,” and his moniker is a source of pride. “I’ve been Boozey since I’ve left/I ain’t changin’ for a check,” he proudly rapped in “A Bar Song.” Still, he’s aware it stands out in Nashville’s sea of Zachs, Lukes, and Chases. “I didn’t do myself any favors,” he quips. “Got a name like Shaboozey, coming in making country.”

But when his name became the butt of a series of tone-deaf jokes at the 2024 CMA Awards, including one about “kicking Shaboozey,” he shot back on social media. “Ain’t nobody kicking me!” he posted, with a photo of him smiling and shrugging his shoulders.

He says he noted the immediate support of fans after that public moment of microaggression, broadcast live on network TV.

“Contrary to what the world and the internet wants you to think, there’s a lot of people out there that support and are going to go out there and defend,” he tells me. “At the CMAs a couple years ago, the amount of people that got up, online, and were like, ‘No, that’s wrong. We’re not going for that…’ I do feel supported, and blessed to be who I am, to be an African-American in this space. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

But he encountered unexpected blowback for the heartfelt, personal acceptance speech he gave a little more than a year later at the Grammys, in which he praised immigrants’ contributions to this country at the height of the ICE raids in Minnesota. “Immigrants built this country, literally,” he said. Some Black Americans — including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King — criticized his remarks for erasing the legacy of slavery and forced migration, prompting Shaboozey to issue a thoughtful clarification the next day. It was graceful and respectful, without being an apology.

“To be clear, I know and believe that we — Black people, have also built this country,” he wrote. “My words were never intended to dismiss that truth. I am both a Black man and the son of Nigerian immigrants and in the overwhelming moment of winning my first Grammy my focus was on honoring the sacrifices my parents made by coming to this country to give me and my siblings opportunities they never had.” 

Shaboozey says he wrote multiple versions of his speech before the ceremony, including one that mentioned slavery, but in the moment, nerves took over and his message got “lost in translation.” Once again, he found himself worrying about what his mom was going to think.

“I think everyone kind of knows what I meant, you know?” he says. “But I understand I let a lot of people down, especially on the first day of Black History Month, and being the first Black man to win that award. There’s ways I could have approached it a lot better.”

Shaboozey adds that he simply didn’t think he was going to win. He’d gone into the previous year’s Grammys as a five-time nominee, with the hottest song in the country behind him, and still came up short.

“I want to do great things, and I know to do something great, you kind of got to be uncomfortable. And you might be threatening to some people.”

“I lost every single category,” he recalls. “I got my parents next to me, my sister, and I’m looking to the left, seeing the emotion on them, to a point where this year I didn’t even [want to] invite them. I was like, ‘Mom, don’t get glammed up and come here all the way from Virginia just to watch your son lose an award.’”

Shaboozey says he’s talked often with fellow Black country artists like Kane Brown and the War and Treaty, and with the actress-singer Teyana Taylor (who won a Golden Globe this year), about how hard it can be to get some recognition.

“As an African-American, there’s a level of being OK with just being nominated. Having a seat at the table is sometimes enough for us,” he says. “We feel like we won’t win, we can’t win.”

It is, perhaps, not so different from the way Shaboozey depicts the gang of outlaws on his new album, that “group of people who have been discarded and are just looking to survive.” This summer, Shaboozey will hit the road on a tour that aims to help other left-of-center country artists meet their moment. He’s calling it the Outlaws Never Die Tour. BigXthaPlug is on the bill, as are Black country songwriters like Kashus Culpepper and Angel White. He’s also showcasing women, including Carter Faith, Noeline Hofmann, Noah Cyrus, and Brittney Spencer.

“It’s a tour celebrating country music in all different shapes, sizes, colors, and putting it under one umbrella,” Shaboozey says. “A lot of those guys were the ones that weren’t winning awards, they were the ones that were outside of it all. We all romanticize that life, but like, who’s really living like that, you know? Kashus, Brittany, BigX, Carter, Noah, all of us. I feel like we’re all outlaws.”

If an outlaw is also defined as someone who makes their own rules, then Shaboozey qualifies. He knows there’s pressure on him to follow up the impossible success of “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and yet instead of trying to duplicate that hit, he’s swinging for the fences with an ambitious concept record. He admits he’s been thinking a little about the “sophomore slump,” but that doesn’t quite pertain to him: The Outlaw Cherie Lee is Shaboozey’s fourth album, after all. 

He’s also having to remind people — via his cowboy imagery and detailed answers about Marty Robbins and Townes Van Zandt — that he is a country music artist through and through.

“A big thing with me entering this space was, it’s bravery, you know? It’s about having courage,” he says. “You can ask my mom, ‘What’s the one thing that Collins, or Boozey, said growing up?’ And he said he wants to change the world.” 

He relates that to something his immigrant father taught him: “My dad was really big on individualism. He always talked about being an individual and not being in groupthink, not being in herd thinking. I want to do great things,” he continues, “and I know to do something great, you kind of got to be uncomfortable. And you might be threatening to some people.”

Before getting into music, Shaboozey had dreams of becoming a novelist. He loves words and storytelling, and still harbors a dream of one day writing his great American novel or memoir. He already has a very outlaw title picked out: The Legend of the Kid.

“I have a song called ‘The Legend of the Kid,’ which hopefully comes out at some point. It’s not on the album, but the first moments when I felt like I’m being called were as a young kid,” he says. “That was the first time where I started questioning things and being curious, like ‘Why are things like this, why can’t they be like this?’ Who I am now is really just the same as when I was that kid, wide-eyed in a small pond, figuring out what the rest of the world is like.”

A FEW WEEKS AFTER the ACM Awards — where Shaboozey loses in his two nominated categories — he and I regroup for a chat on Zoom. He’s back in L.A. and gearing up for the release of “Cowgirl,” an irresistibly hooky track on The Outlaw Cherie Lee that sounds like “Wagon Wheel” crossed with “A Bar Song.” Written years before “A Bar Song,” it has the potential to match that enormous hit. (In a move that underscores his pop culture savvy, Shaboozey cast Ciara Miller, star of Bravo’s Summer House reality show, as the video’s gun-toting, whiskey-shooting lead.)

Today, he’s wearing a scarf wrapped around his head, and excitedly asks if he can show me something. Bounding out of the room, Shaboozey returns clutching his Grammy trophy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. He’s removed his headscarf and is now rubbing it over the gramophone.

“I gotta keep this thing polished,” he says with a huge laugh, before positioning it so that his name, front and center on the plaque, clearly faces the camera.

We talk about what’s to come after The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales. With a historic hit song behind him, one that’s been streamed more than a billion and a half times, and his first Grammy, what does Shaboozey hope for next? More crossover hits? A shelf of Grammys? A ride off into the sunset like the outlaws he writes about?

“I want to take this as far as it can go,” he says without hesitation. “I’m super competitive, and I really believe in myself. I want to continue to get better at my craft and continue to make really cool, prolific stuff that challenges what music and art can be.”

There are plans in the works for a Cherie Lee graphic novel, and he’s trying to manifest a visual album that connects every song on the album and could premiere in theaters. He’s also already talked to his manager about recording a “true traditional country album” for his next project.

But for all his talk of outlaws, Shaboozey can’t help but gravitate toward a hero.

“My real dream is I want to make a Batman movie. I want to be able to call up someone at A24 and call someone up at Lionsgate and be like, ‘Yo, I got this idea for this movie,’ and they’re like, ‘Booze, heck yeah, let’s do it!’”

And if Batman Boozey doesn’t quite come true? He’s still good.

“I can wake up in the morning and, if I have a bad day, go down and just grab this thing, and be like, ‘No matter what anybody does, you did this,’” he says, reaching for his Grammy. “‘You made this happen with your name on it.’”

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Photographs by Sacha Lecca