7 Things You Need to Know About Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’

The curtain has finally risen for Beyoncé’s next act. 

Cowboy Carter is an album that pays respects to the country, blues, and gospel legends of old, while also shining a spotlight on a new generation of artists in the space. Across the 27-song tracklist, there are appearances from country legends like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, as well as newer country stars like Shaboozy, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, and Willie Jones.

"This album took over five years," Beyoncé explains in her press release. "It's been really great to have the time and the grace to be able to take my time with it. I was initially going to put Cowboy Carter out first, but with the pandemic, there was too much heaviness in the world. We wanted to dance. We deserved to dance. But I had to trust God's timing." 

As the name implies, Cowboy Carter leans heavily into the sounds of country music, but there are also shades of R&B, pop, house, and even Jersey club layered throughout the album. Songs like “My Rose,” and “Protector” sound like they could have lived on a Destiny’s Child album, and the Shaboozey-assisted “Spaghettii” is essentially a rap song with country inflections. Beyoncé does all of that and still leaves space to pay homage to country classics like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” 

These choices help make Cowboy Carter feel accessible to people who don’t often listen to country music, while also welcoming longtime fans of the genre who have an affinity for oldies. 

With Beyoncé’s new era finally underway, here are seven takeaways from Cowboy Carter, including why I believe Cowboy Carter it’s the perfect way to get more people into country music (myself included).

Before the album dropped, Beyoncé said, “This ain’t a country album. It’s a ‘Beyoncé’ album,” and she flexes her mastery of a lot of the sounds she’s touched throughout her career on Cowboy Carter, in addition to country. Black music—from hip-hop to jazz to blues to gospel to R&B—is intertwined throughout the album, and country music lives inexplicably in this knot. Sometimes the diverse production choices are jarring, like the shift from the soft “Daughter” to bass-heavy “Spaghettii,” but most of these detours allow for Cowboy Carter to cover more ground and feel all-inclusive of the various forms of country music. 

“Spaghettii” opens with Linda Martell discussing how confining genres can be, before Beyoncé straight-up raps on the track. Then there’s a song like “II Hands II Heaven,” which has flecks of R&B and house music influences. It almost sounds like it shouldn’t be on an album like Cowboy Carter at all, from a sonic perspective, but the lyrics are still consistent with the project’s country themes, including references to coyotes and whiskey. There are also songs like “Bodyguard” that sound like a pop-infused country song that an artist like Lana Del Ray would’ve made in the early 2010s (and I mean that in the best way possible). 

The current country music landscape is filled with vibrant and diverse voices and Cowboy Carter has the potential to be a gateway for rap and R&B heads (like myself) to begin exploring the expansive scene. Storytelling is at the root of both rap and country, and the way that Beyoncé is able to flesh out vivid worlds within each song on Cowboy Carter shows how the genre doesn’t have to be as one-note as the stereotypes might try to make it seem. Artists like Shaboozey, Tanner Adell, and Willie Jones are all young country acts who have been gaining motion on their own terms, and they make the genre feel more accessible to new fans exploring the space. Cowboy Carter is an album that puts several genres on display, but country takes the main stage, and the genre will be better off for it.