Shaboozey might be the biggest artist in country music with the highest disparity between his commercial success and the critical acclaim he deserves. It’s understandable: his breakout hit was pop/dance heavy and leaned on the classic country hit trick of referencing a throwback everyone loves, flipping J-Kwon’s “Tipsy” into “A Bar Song.” Perhaps artistically ambitious country rap (although this album is much more) is just a tough product to sell to the country music listening public?
Where I’ve Been Isn’t Where I’m Going was proof there was depth beneath “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” the breakout hit from Collins Obinna “Shaboozey” Chibueze. It’s a really strong album with a similar flow. It rises and falls, drifting between rap and country ballads. But one song reached the highest of highs while the others around it didn’t.. Even without the memorable melodies, production excellence, or creative clarity to make them hits, the songs on that album showed signs that this Northern Virginia breakout was going to be more than a one-hit wonder.
The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales is the realization of that prediction. It vibes in all the right places, bumps and thumps, and follows a real emotional arc despite being an anthology, not a complete story. Drawing a lot of artistic comparisons to Sinners, the 2025 Oscar-winning film starring Michael B. Jordan as depression-era outlaw twins, it leads with swagger. Still, it is teeming with love and heartbreak underneath.
It is thus unsurprising that visual media served as the foundation for this record. Alongside the album, Shaboozey and collaborators built out a three-issue comic book series expanding Cherie Lee’s story. The result is the manifestation of crystal clear creative vision, landing in a year where the country’s best records are defined by firm commitment to a story, a feeling, an emotion: Dandelion, The Way I Am, With Heaven on Top, Cloud 9 and plenty more. Although there are echoes of his now more than two-year-old hit (“Cowgirl,” which actually was written four years before “Tipsy”), Shaboozey is making the case for himself as much more than his commercial peak and one of the genre’s most intriguing artists.
There are wrong ways to perceive this album. Listen to it purely through the lens of “A Bar Song,” and you’ll walk away disappointed. You’d walk away from Dandelion disappointed if all you wanted was another “Choosin’ Texas.” If you stopped reading at “The Outlaw Cherie Lee,” expecting one unbroken narrative, then the loose, anthology structure reads as a shortcoming instead of a choice. And if you go in already rolling your eyes (“Ah, nice try, Shaboozey. You’re just the bar song guy.”), you’ll hear novelty instead of what’s actually here.
What’s actually here is a fusion nobody’s attempted, let alone pulled off, before. There’s the Depression-era Black Southern culture Sinners mined so well. This album begins in a place that is sonically less in line with the height-of-the-old-west lyrical content and more like Post Malone conjuring the ghosts of Ralph Stanley and Lead Belly. Then there’s country swing and jazz, spaghetti Western strings, straight cowboy songs (shoutout “Streets of Laredo” being retitled as “The Epilogue”), and 2010s rap and R&B. Whenever Jamie Foxx shows up on a skit sounding uncannily like Dave Chappelle’s Ahchoo in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (a lost classic that anyone under 30 should see) it’s a jolt of mid-2000s Black pop culture when he was all over the movies and Kanye West songs.
Layer on top of that a kind of country rock: big, cinematic production with all the genre’s signposts intact, but banjo and fiddle standing in for electric guitar. Has anything like this ever existed? Has a country rap album ever aimed this high?
It could have all been ruined by hamfisted engineering, but this cowboy anthology is a masterclass in audio production. It is massive in scale without ever blurring into a “wall of sound.” It’s more like a wall of knives: everything sharp, everything distinct. The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales is crawling with terrific audio tricks like on “Sweet Revenge,” where a fiddle solo drifts into a tone that starts sounding like a guitar solo. It’s a fantastic piece of production sleight-of-hand.
Many of the best elements of country and rap are present in one song or another. “High Noon” and “If I Was an Outlaw” bring the exact kind of humor a country album needs at least once. The latter almost plays like Afroman wrote a country swing tune. “Cowgirl” works the same strum pattern and chord progression a thousand other songs have used, but Shaboozey’s simply the best at it right now. “Burn It Down (feat. Leon Bridges)” and “Bullets + Blades (feat. Kehlani)” are beautiful tracks that carry the record’s emotional weight and are dark horse candidates to have streaming success. Finally, “The Epilogue,” with Orville Peck, closes things out well, even if it’s essentially Johnny Cash singing “Streets of Laredo” on American IV: The Man Comes Around all over again. It’s very reminiscent of Willie Watson in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. There’s another really lovely production note here: the fife flourish at 1:21 is an excellent touch.
Artistic clarity and technical excellence shine on The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales. It’s what country music is supposed to be about: reverent toward the genre’s history while daring to push past it all while having fun. This album adds something new to the canon rather than just emulating it the way so many outlaw-country revivalists do (we’re all thinking of one in particular…Charley Crockett. Sorry!).
This might be a difficult album for anyone not okay with progress in country music and finds themselves in comments sections complaining about music that’s too “pop,” blissfully unaware of the pop sounds that have always been in country music since Bob Wills was doing big band jazz in a cowboy costume. Some of that is the swing and the hip-hop swagger. Some of it is just evidence that Shaboozey is a well-listened man who works with professionals and is himself a top-notch creative.
Unfortunately, Shaboozey’s latest project may find itself to be a victim of its own success. Like Gabriella Rose’s I Wanna Be Loved, this album is in such a unique and unfamiliar artistic zone that it won’t sound country enough for the traditionalists, and it’s a little too eclectic for the radio.
But we can all hope that The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales gets the appreciation it deserves for being a perfectly singular album in an already outstanding year for country music.
