Back in 2024, Shaboozey met Rolling Stone for coffee in Nashville. It was just a few weeks before Beyoncé revealed the track list for her country project, Cowboy Carter, and at the time, he was keeping it a secret that he had worked with Beyoncé at all. He also didn’t even know if his contributions to the LP made the cut.
“That was almost three years ago. Sometimes it’s like a blur, you know?” Shaboozey tells Rolling Stone in a special live episode of the Nashville Now podcast. “That was a wild year. It was definitely like being on a roller-coaster, one that you didn’t anticipate how fast it was going to take off and go. It was a journey.”
Shaboozey eventually found out he was on Cowboy Carter, in the swaggering song “Spaghettii” and the frenetic “Sweet Honey Buckin’,” 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 of Beyoncé. “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.”
But before Shaboozey even became a songwriter himself, the music of Beyoncé was soundtracking his formative years. Born in 1995, he grew up on 2000s hip-hop, R&B, and, he says, Destiny’s Child. He was especially in love with “Irreplaceable. “I used to sing that song every time it came on the radio,” he says. “I was screaming it. My cousins, all my family members, Beyoncé was their idol, so to be a part of that project really just kind of just gave me a stamp and a battery pack.”
Shaboozey, who made chart history with his 19-week Number One “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” is gearing up for the release of his new album The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales, due July 31. Last week, he dropped the new single “Cowgirl,” featuring Summer House cast member Ciara Miller in the video.
“I was just happy that all the work I’d put in over the years of wanting to have a big moment like that finally happened in God’s time, in the universe’s time, and because of the great team I have,” he says, looking back on both “A Bar Song” and Cowboy Carter. “I was super ready for that moment, you know…. So, thank you, Beyoncé.”
Read Shaboozey’s cover story here, and watch his full interview on Nashville Now.
