Producers of this month’s 59th CMA Awards decided to end the show with a high-profile, cross-genre collaboration: Dallas rapper BigXthaPlug teamed up with established country star Luke Combs to perform their song “Pray Hard.” It was a show of acceptance by mainstream country music and the Nashville system to BigX, who released the album of collabs with country stars, I Hope You’re Happy, in August.
Breland, the singer, songwriter, and producer behind the hit “My Truck” and songs for Keith Urban like “Out the Cage,” says there’s a reason why some non-country artists are accepted by Music Row and others, like Beyoncé are not.
“I think that country music is fine with certain artists coming over here if they do it with the artists that they trust,” he tells Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast. “For BigXthaPlug, and I don’t know what he might feel like — ‘Nah, I haven’t been accepted here at all…,’ I don’t want to assume — but what it looks like to me is that BigXthaPlug started doing some of these collabs with much success and then decided, ‘Hey, I’m going to lean all the way in and do a whole collab album with all of these pop and country artists and it’s gonna work.’”
That’s in direct contrast to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, last year’s Grammy winner for both Album of the Year and Best Country Album.
“She chose to put a bunch of artists on there that people weren’t as familiar with. And didn’t come to town and play the game the same way that everyone else would,” Breland says. “So it’s really easy for the institutions in Nashville to be like, ‘She’s not with us because she didn’t come here and take all the same steps that someone like Post Malone or BigXthaPlug did.”’
The mainstream Music Row response to Cowboy Carter would have been different had Beyoncé done likewise, according to Breland.
“I promise you that if Beyoncé had made her album in town and had written with more writers and producers who were here in town and popped out somewhere on Broadway and did CMA Fest, and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry, people’s reception to her in town would have been a little different.
“But part of her album was her saying, ‘I’m not going to do this the way the establishment wants me to,’” he continues. “I think that’s honorable.”
During his appearance on our Nashville Now podcast, Breland also talks at length about how AI is stealing music’s soul, what it means to “play the game” in Nashville, and how he feels about his friend and collaborator Keith Urban performing a private concert at Mar-a-Lago attended by President Trump. Watch the full episode below.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, and Clever.
