From Trap & Country To The Big Time: How Shaboozey Is Playing Both Coachella & Stagecoach (Cover Feature)

The starting point of an origin story is never as certain as Hollywood makes it out to be. Everyone is a product of countless meanders and on-ramps that don’t follow an easy path. But if you’re looking for the zero milepost on Shaboozey’s high-velocity rise to the top of the charts and to plum festival positions, start with the showcase his management team at Range Media Partners set up for him in February 2024.

“I hadn’t played a show in awhile,” Shaboozey (his birth name is Collins Obinna Chibueze) says. “My managers had to convince me. I had just joined Range and everyone wanted to see me play. They said go out there and have a great time. I stepped out and I hadn’t performed in three or four years.”

Shaboozey and his Range team — Abas Pauti and Jared Cotter — all agree that he needed a little push to get on stage that day. But thank goodness he did. Unbeknownst to anyone involved, Ricky Lawson — a frequent songwriting collaborator with Beyonce and the A&R chief for her company Parkwood Entertainment — was there.

Nobody really knows what drew him. Shaboozey heretofore had been primarily known as a trap artist who tinged his music with elements of country and Americana, each of his first two records — 2018’s Lady Wrangler and 2022’s Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die — increasingly leaning harder to the three-chords-and-the-truth side of the equation. Maybe Lawson heard something on those records and had an inkling Shaboozey had something his megastar boss needed for her country album.

The rumors about Queen Bey’s artistic turn were already out there — the showcase came after Bey’s break-the-Internet Super Bowl commercial that hinted she had a cowboy-hat-and-boots project in the offing and “Texas Hold ‘Em” had already made its debut — and Cotter figured if it was true, Shaboozey would be a good fit for it.

“We were talking about the rumors of Beyonce doing a country album and I thought if [Shaboozey] got his shot he’d kill it. The next day he had that showcase Range had put together and it would be the first time performing ‘A Bar Song’ and the first time in years performing anything. Ricky Lawson just happened to be in the audience and the next day Shaboozey was in a studio,” Cotter said. “You convince your client to do something because you never know where it’s going to lead.”

Even while he was laying down tracks for Beyonce, Shaboozey says he “didn’t even know what the plan was.” So he cut a few songs and waited. Two weeks later, the release date for Cowboy Carter was announced. When it hit the streets March 29 — upending the Nashville establishment and launching a thousand think pieces about country’s definition — Shaboozey found out he featured on two songs that made the final cut: “Sweet Honey Buckin’” and “Spaghetti,” the latter of which also included Linda Martell, the pioneering country singer who was the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry in 1969.

Martell is part of this origin story, too. 

“She was in a soul group but she wanted to make country too,” Shaboozey says. “It’s such a great story and it’s so similar to mine. She was in one space but she wanted to do other things. He’d known about Martell before he ended up on a track with her (and before Cowboy Carter brought her music and story back into the limelight), so much so that he started messing around with the idea of writing a biopic about her.

“I heard about her from a friend in Nashville. I asked her to put  me on new music and classic songs I hadn’t heard about. I heard ‘Bad Case Of The Blues’ and it slaps. She was yodeling and everything,” he says.

With the success and exposure brought by Cowboy Carter, the Range team felt the time was ripe to release “A Bar Song” — in fact, it hit the streets two weeks after the Beyonce drop — and see what might happen. And it’s truly hard to conceive of all that decision wrought. The song is a tale of a down-on-his-luck guy with pressures at home and on the job who just needs to bury it all underneath some booze for a little while. That’s pretty standard fare for country, historically. But the magic here is that it interpolates J-Kwon’s 2004 hit “Tipsy,” a tune with the kind of sing-songy chorus a group of happy drinkers shout in a watering hole.

Now, no one has enough hubris to say they thought the song would go on to top the charts for a record-matching 19 weeks (tied appropriately  with Lil Nas X’s rap-meets-country smash “Old Town Road”), but Team Shaboozey did think there was some something there when he cut it.

“Abas was in the studio and he called me and said ‘We’ve got something, J,’” Cotter says. “It did a billion streams and was massive on radio. It broke records all over the world and it was the first song ever to be No 1 on four formats. You can’t predict those things.”

Shaboozey says when he was writing, he always worked back to the J-Kwon-inspired line “Everybody in the bar getting tipsy.”

“Me and my producers were kinda playing and throwing different lines out and every line was better than the last line. Once we got the Jack Daniel’s line — ‘They know me and Jack Daniel’s got a history’ — that was the moment,” Shaboozey said.

But the line that follows — “There’s a party downtown near 5th Street” — was not one Shaboozey was particularly enamored with. Not at first, anyway.

“My producer said if you want the song to be massive, you have to keep the party line,” he says.

And so he did and so it was. The song of the summer, a massive party anthem. Grammy nominations. All of it.

But here’s the thing: the song isn’t what it seems.

“I really hope that people realize that it’s a sad song. The guy is drinking his problems away. He’s masking it,” Shaboozey says. He hopes one day it’ll get a deep re-listen — similar to Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks” or Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” — and folks will come to hear the deeper story. For now? Well, you can’t argue with five months at No. 1, can you?

There’s no doubt that beyond the catchy chorus, much of the success of “A Bar Song” is due to the unique combination of trap and country elements, seemingly incongruous genres that Shaboozey doesn’t see as incongruent at all. The child of Nigerian immigrants and raised in Woodbridge, Virginia, he thinks with the deep layers of meaning of the novelist he dreamt of becoming (he’s toyed with the idea of writing a novel that’s a sequel to an album and vice versa as a way of combining his artistic passions).

“What’s interesting if you think geographically where both of these genres started, they were in the same places. Trap music originated in Atlanta which is the same place that gave birth to country legends. The places that hold the lion’s share [of country and trap artists] — Georgia, Texas and Tennessee — these people grew up in similar neighborhoods and areas,” Shaboozey says. 

But it’s not just the land, it’s the lifestyle. Great trap tracks and great country songs tell similar stories.

“These are groups that take risks and do things outside the constructs of the law. You live and die by the sword,” he says. “These are songs about being on the outside of society and maybe the people are immoral and living on the outside to survive.”

And of course, there’s a foundation of storytelling and exaggeration — “Marty Robbins didn’t really shoot a man named Texas Red,” he says, citing Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs as one of his favorite albums and its track “The Master’s Call” as “maybe my favorite song.”

Range’s Abas Pauti said Shaboozey’s had that idea of combining the two great American outlaw genres since he first met him in 2019, when they lived near one another in Los Angeles and were introduced by a mutual friend.

“He told me his story and his vision of the sound and what he wanted to do: he wanted to go country but he didn’t know how to do it,” he says. “His first project was Lady Wrangler and he thematically experimented with those country elements. He always danced around it and did it on trap beats with trap drums, but he wanted to be a hybrid artist. He had this vision of where he wanted to be and it’s crazy to think in 2019 he had that sound in the back of his mind.”

Inevitably, there’s criticism: that he’s too country to be taken seriously as a trap artist or that the trap beats aren’t “real” country music (whatever that means). 

“Sometimes I think who am I offending but I am just an artist expressing myself and being inspired by different things out there,” Shaboozey says. “I definitely get into a bubble and think about how this is going to be received and it’s hard to shut out the criticism sometimes. I think I unfairly get it sometimes as someone trying to get people to listen to country music who wouldn’t listen to it.”

But of course, people do listen — lots of them and all over the world. He recently wrapped a run in Europe that included club headlining dates and festival plays.

“I was surprised on that run how that sound carries over in Cologne or Amsterdam. It’s really hard to have a record globally impact the way ‘A Bar Song’ did, but the song never became bigger than him. They are singing every song. The sound has changed and it’s inclusive. People are diving into country music and being open to what it can be,” Pauti says.

And stateside, Shaboozey spent time opening for Jelly Roll — another artist who, superficially, doesn’t look or often sound like mass market country — and doing his own club stops, including two 1,200-ticket sellouts of Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club Sept. 21 and 23, grossing a combined $60,000.

By September, it would have been easy to catapult Shaboozey to bigger buildings than the larger clubs like the 9:30, but Cotter said it’s important to remember that in February, Shaboozey was playing to 200 people at a Range showcase and even that was his first live performance in years. As tempting as it might be to skip steps on the back of an earth-shattering success like “A Bar Song,” it’s all about the long game here for Shaboozey, his management at Range and his agency team at CAA led by Jenna Adler,

“What separates ‘Boozey from other ‘song of the summer’ artists is that he’s a real artist. It’s 10 years in the making for him. He’s put the work in and the music we’re about to start rolling out is just as good or better than ‘A Bar Song.’ You can look at him and see the difference from the past. He represents a new wave and not just in country; he’s a conglomerate and that’s why he’s so attractive,” Cotter says. “We don’t want to skip steps. We want to build a long standing career. We want people to say ‘damn i missed him’ because that’s how you build demand, so the buildings we play next year will be more indicative of his success. We don’t want to jump ahead because we can right now. We want to jump ahead forever.”

And part of that strategy is an enviably busy summer festival schedule. He’s on the bill for Tortuga in Ft. Lauderdale, Railbird in Lexington, Glastonbury, Roskide, Lollapalooza Paris and plenty more, including both Coachella and Stagecoach.

That’s a rare double and Shaboozey admits that while it was a dream for him to do it, “I wasn’t even sure you could, legally or whatever,” but Adler says it’s a testament to his bridge-building ability and his work ethic.

“Working with Shaboozey has been truly incredible. His upcoming performances at Stagecoach and Coachella highlight his talent and dedication to reaching new heights. I’m so proud to be part of his journey as he continues to break boundaries and make a lasting impact on the music world,” she said.

The artists who have pulled off both in the same year, as Shaboozey will, makes for pretty good company: Sturgill Simpson, Trampled by Turtles, Post Malone, Willie Nelson, Carin Leon, Orville Peck and Yola. 

The commonality there — other than predictably visionary booking by Goldenvoice’s Stacy Vee — is those artists bridge gaps. They honor country by making it feel more expansive.

And Shaboozey hopes all the festival work will open some eyes as how expansive it can be. Festivals are great for discovery — Shaboozey himself fell in love with War On Drugs while walking around Coachella, hearing a snippet wafting towards him and checking out their set — and they require an artist to grab the listeners’ attention, as War on Drugs did for Shaboozey.

And a successful set can lead to bigger and better things, which Cotter says, for Shaboozey, could be anything he puts his mind to.

“The sky is the limit for Shaboozey. He could play stadiums before all is said and done, before you even think,” he says. “He’s building a long lasting career and that is the goal: to maintain that creativity and above all, his happiness.”