A dozen years after rapping songs about NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon, Northern Virginia native Shaboozey is nominated five times at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards for crooning a song about drinking double shots of whiskey on Nashville’s Lower Broadway and partnering with Beyoncé
on her 2024-released, Album of the Year-nominated “Cowboy Carter.”
Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” also features a hook that blends with J-Kwon’s beloved two-decade-old rap classic “Tipsy,” while his Queen Bey duet “Sweet Honey Buckiin” beats with a thump like it was snatched directly from an after-hours DJ set in a Parisian nightclub.
However, as a solo performer, country-meets-western roots guitar remains familiar throughout the chart-topping performer’s trio of critically acclaimed albums released in the past decade, including his Top 10 “Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going,” released in 2024.
Dig deeper into how the performer blends his native state of Virginia’s unique embrace of bordering Washington, D.C., to the north and country, folk and rock’s traditions in North Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia to the south, making him on the surface an outlier but more fundamentally steeped within the roots of American music than most top-tier country and pop artists.
How his Virginia roots impact his sound and style
“Virginia breeds creative individuals,” Shaboozey said in a recent Vevo interview. “We live outside of everything a lot of the time. We’re able to have this freedom to explore different soundscapes and environments because it’s not a unified sound in Virginia. So, I feel like it’s a perfect place for a blend (that maybe to others couldn’t really cross and make sense) to happen there. I feel like music was ready for something new.
Shaboozey described the breadth of his creative forebears in an April 2024 interview with USA Today.
“Being from Virginia, you’ve got acts like Pharrell, Missy, and Timbaland, who do come from hip-hop,” he said. “And you also have that country history as well with Patsy Cline, the Carter Family and Emmylou Harris.”
Insofar as his creative reach touched Beyoncé’s 32-time Grammy-winning orbit for the “Cowboy Carter” album tracks “Spaghettii” and “Sweet Honey Buckiin’,” he tells The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network, that “making music for the modern cowboy, the modern outlaw, the modern person who stands on their own against insurmountable odds” clearly has appeal as broad as it reaches high into pop culture’s embrace of country’s aesthetics and inspirations.
What inspired Shaboozey to write ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)?’
For Shaboozey, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” represents the creative height of his first decade as a musician because its construction allows his past and present to merge.
He tells MTV that he was a latchkey, middle-class kid who grew up as the son of a college-educated chicken farmer. Thus, for as much as he was driven by reading novels, he was a fan of watching Lil’ Bow Wow, Ja Rule, Jennifer Lopez and Usher’s music videos on BET and MTV.
Part of the inspiration for “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” — a hit from 2004, thus in the same era he was watching music videos as a teenager — comes from hearing the song’s downloadable flip phone ringtone and never forgetting it.
Shaboozey and Shania Twain, backstage at the 2024 People’s Choice Awards at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
“I didn’t really play instruments growing up, I think for me it was just a pen and a piece of paper … just started writing things, it was always kind of there,” he says. “Sometimes I would write to the ringtones on my parents’ phones. … I would take the flip phones, play a ringtone and just start writing to those ringtones.”
Shaboozey’s award nominations, redefined success, career to come
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” spent a record-breaking 19 uninterrupted weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, making it the longest-leading song by a solo artist in the chart’s history, surpassing Lil Nas X’s Billy Ray Cyrus and Diplo collaborations for “Old Town Road.”
That success has yielded more intrigue through nominations than acclaim via award victories. However, that could change at the Grammy Awards on Sunday.
At November’s Country Music Association Awards, Shaboozey was nominated for New Artist of the Year and Single of the Year. However, at the Grammys, he’s nominated for Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance for “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
From left, Chappell R.oan, Shaboozey, Teddy Swims and Quavo attend the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards in New York
He is also nominated for Best Melodic Rap Performance for his feature on Beyoncé’s “Spaghettii,” along with country music pioneer Linda Martell. Also, a David Guetta remix of “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is up for Best Remixed Recording, but that award would go to the remixer alone.
Celebrated for being ‘different, unique’
The past 12 months for Shaboozey have seen him spring from being a quietly and critically well-regarded Nashville and pop favorite to a global superstar. He’s a red carpet staple, appearing at seemingly every awards show, including the Cannes Film Festival.
On Thanksgiving, the NFL featured him as a halftime performer at a game in Detroit. He also appeared with Beyoncé during her halftime appearance on Christmas day in her Houston hometown, alongside her “Blackbiird” collaborators Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, Reyna Roberts, and Brittney Spencer.
His year closed with a dozen opening slots on tour with Music City-born country and rock chart-topper Jelly Roll.
“All the things that were exposed to me, I put in my music, so finally being able to combine all of my interests feels like a full circle moment,” Shaboozey tells The Tennessean about his present work and looking ahead.
“It’s great to get your flowers in celebration of being different and being unique.”
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Shaboozey’s journey from rapping about NASCAR to 5 Grammy nominations
