The country hitmaker takes a major swing with his new Wild West concept album, and mostly connects
On his third album, 2024’s Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, and its monster hit, “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Shaboozey is a cowboy for our times. The Virginia-raised Nigerian American artist is blessed with a cavernous baritone and a sense of music history where rap and country converse as equally elastic genres and equally deep traditions. It’s no surprise to hear him thinking big with his ambitious new concept album, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales. According to Shaboozey, the LP tells the story of a sheriff’s daughter who sees her daddy gunned down, takes to the trail seeking vengeance, and ends up falling for one of the killers — a romance tucked inside an outlaw epic, right on par for a guy who does well with genre mashups.
The actual narrative is more implied than rendered. Cameos from Sam Elliott, Teyana Taylor, and Jamie Foxx help establish the mood, setting up songs like the searing small-town-escape fantasy “Burn It Down,” with Leon Bridges, and the spaghetti-Western-tinged gunslinger story song “Lone Survivor.” As outlaw-country singers go, Shaboozey has a nice mix of Waylon Jennings-style gruff and Willie Nelson-type chill, whether he’s lending his ample low-end rumble to laid-back honky-tonk (“If I Was an Outlaw”), tear-in-my-beer acoustic laments (“Kissed by an Angel”), mournful balladry (the moving Kehlani duet, “Bullets and Blades”), or lonely range-rover fatalism (“Coyote’s Point”).
He’s not exactly aiming for another “Tipsy” in these 20 songs, and there are times when hard-bitten dust-caked authenticity piles up a little too heavily. He’s at his best when his music has more stylistic give to it. “High Noon,” with Gunna, lives easily in the space between Nashville and Atlanta, and the stomp-and-clap standouts like “Cowgirl” and “Born to Die” rattle with a down-home, deep-rolling barroom boom that is his sonic safety zone. One thing’s for sure listening to The Outlaw Cherie Lee: Shaboozey isn’t interested in merely going down in history as the guy who had that one big bar song.
