Beyoncé is on a historic, legacy-making run, following era-defining albums like Lemonade and Renaissance with yet another cultural monolith. Cowboy Carter is masterfully produced, simultaneously widely appealing and boundary-pushing.
The album follows a lot of the same patterns of the musician’s “Act I” (2022’s Renaissance) by honing in on one genre — country, in this instance — and using its aesthetics and history as the guiding concept for the album. Cowboy Carter isn’t just a country album (in fact, the Grammy record holder herself has said it’s a “Beyoncé album”) but an album about country.
It fuses renowned sounds and artists like Willy Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Linda Martell with the future of country, especially when it comes to the presence of Black artists in the genre. Sonically and lyrically, it inspects, evaluates, deconstructs and reconstructs what country music is and what it could be.
10. “Alliigator Tears”
It’s not just its title. “Alliigator Tears” is Cowboy Carter‘s country/swamp blues masterpiece. The drawl in both Beyoncé’s vocals and the accompanying fingerstyle guitar makes this track a very specific mood piece in the album, adding to both its color and its scope (again, testing the limits of the meaning of country music).
Beyoncé plays with the identity of the song’s sound and the way it transports us to the Deep South bayous of Louisiana to build her story around the concept of “crocodile tears.” The subject of this track is a master manipulator and Beyoncé is exploring the kind of contradictory reactions their charm has on her.
9. “Sweet / Honey / Buckiin'” (with Shaboozey)
“Sweet / Honey / Buckiin'” is Cowboy Carter‘s most Renaissance-sounding song, a connection which is cleverly emphasized by its title’s call back to its “Act I” sibling “Pure / Honey”. Like Renaissance, this track is a lot more experimental, textured, and modern as it twists the usual pop song verse-chorus structure into three separate moments, each sounding like its own song, but connected enough to make sense together.
“Sweet” kicks the 5-minute long track off with R&B vocals (and a perfect interpolation of Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces”), Shaboozey’s trap rap verse, and a lot of repetitive samples reminiscent of dance music. With “Honey,” Beyoncé turns mellow with some sugary doo-wop melodies and flow, before completely shifting gears to “Buckin'”‘s much more hip-hop/trap heavy beats and verses. The song, whose lyrics touch on Beyoncé’s roots and career, is a whole trip.
8. “Tyrant” (with Dolly Parton)
“Tyrant” is a microcosm of Cowboy Carter. It starts perfectly country with the one and only Dolly Parton setting up the song and introducing Beyoncé, followed by an upbeat, harmony-heavy country intro, and then dropping into an 808 bass-driven hip-hop song that keeps that country element alive through a fast fiddle line.
The lyrics of the main portion of the song are metaphorical and sexual, celebrating and empowering Beyoncé’s sensuality like she’s done recurrently in the past, while the intro and outro contain “old-school country-sounding lyrics about heartbreak and the hangman,” per Live for Live Music.
7. “II Most Wanted” (with Miley Cyrus)
“II Most Wanted” is one of the more commercial songs on Cowboy Carter, which makes sense considering it features one of the album’s most high-profile collaborations with Miley Cyrus. There’s not a lot of experimenting on this one — it’s one of the album’s most typically country-sounding songs, and that’s why it’s also one of its most infectious and easy to digest and love.
Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus sound almost ridiculously good together, their full, raspy, rich timbres gelling together to bless our ears. The lyrics are romantic, describing a whirlwind, reckless romance, and paralleling it with speeding down a highway.
6. “Texas Hold ‘Em”
The whole world has listened to “Texas Hold ‘Em” by now. This was the perfect single to launch the Cowboy Carter era and one of Beyoncé’s most commercially successful songs since Lemonade and “Formation,” and for good reason.
The song is memorable from the jump with a banjo lick played by Rhiannon Giddens that is already timeless. It transported the message that Beyoncé was going country loud and clear for all to hear. The song then evolves adding more strings, percussion, ad-libs, and harmonies. The evocative lyrics are reminiscent of Texas hoedowns and patter calls, while Beyoncé uses the poker game named after her home state to ask her lover to “lay your cards down, down, down, down.”
5. “Bodyguard”
“Bodyguard” is simple yet so effective. The melody and the beat are incredibly infectious and addictive as the singer seductively paints a countryside road trip kind of picture, with allusions to whiskey, cigarettes, gravel, and John Wayne. The lyrics are fun and provocative as Beyoncé threatens whoever tries to come between her and her significant other, but at its core “Bodyguard” is still a love song.
Sonically, it mixes funk with folk to create a perfect Cowboy Carter blend. Although its production is much more stripped back and its structure a much more typical pop approach, it stands out among its peers simply just for how good it sounds and how good it makes you feel when you listen to it. We could play it on loop all day.
4. “Ameriican Requiem”
From “Ameriican Requiem” to the top stop on this list, the positions could easily be switched and it would still make so much sense. The following are arguably Cowboy Carter‘s four masterpieces. Four songs that combine meaningful lyrics with innovative production and form, and that feel as country as they feel “Beyoncé” (yes, by now, that should be its own genre).
“Ameriican Requiem,” specifically, is like the album’s manifesto. It expands upon what Beyoncé has previously mentioned regarding her intentions with Cowboy Carter, especially regarding her position within country and pop music as a Texas-born primarily R&B artist (“They used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ‘nough”). Content-wise, it is one of the richest songs on the album, as well as one of the singer’s strongest vocal performances. Its introduction is reminiscent of an anthem/hymn, then mixing western, country, blues, and rock elements in a majestic combination that makes for an unforgettable opener.
3. “YA YA”
Beyoncé takes us to the rodeo with this vintage rock-and-roll Tina Turner-style banger. “Ya Ya” kicks off with an immediately recognizable sample of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made of Walkin'” and then builds up to become a wall of sound just like the Beach Boys song it samples in the refrain. It’s an impossibly energetic song, propelling the listener to move, by way of its beat and lyrics, which literally tell us to shake, swim, jerk, and twerk.
Like its sound, the lyrics also feel retro, following in the through line of Cowboy Carter in the way it modernizes popular mid-century genres and themes. Beyoncé sings about American culture, namely alcohol, guns, and the Bible, but ultimately “Ya Ya” is not a song to be taken too seriously. It’s just all about having a good time and letting loose. We can already picture it bringing the house down on tour.
2. “16 Carriages”
“16 Carriages” is Beyoncé at her very best. We all know Beyoncé can do everything, but there are few places where she shines more than in a good ballad. This track truly allows her voice to shine, empowered by the emotional weight of the lyrics which detail her journey and career across the last almost 30 years.
The song’s country/rock fusion and acoustic feel give it a very special quality that engulfs and allures us, while Beyoncé’s beautiful, powerful vocals move us before we even have time to concentrate on the content of the words. When we finally do, however, we find the singer at her most vulnerable, as she reflects on the impact of joining the industry so young and staying committed to her craft throughout the years. Now much older, Beyoncé is still grinding, but the sacrifices are all worth it. “Had to sacrifice and leave my fears behind / For legacy, if it’s the last thing I do.”
1. “Daughter”
“Daughter” has been described as Beyoncé’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and we can’t help but agree. The latin-sounding fingerstyle guitar, the dramatic strings, and the mid-song cover of Tommaso Giordani’s 1783 aria “Caro Mio Ben” give “Daughter” a very eerie, catholic, orchestral, confessional energy, especially as the singer admits to having dark violent thoughts and asks God to help her “from these fantasies in my head / They ain’t never been safe ones.”
Across all of Cowboy Carter, “Daughter” is perhaps the most grandiose of songs. Not only is it pristinely produced, with a beautiful instrumental, but it also tells a story from start to finish in a way that’s so theatrical and scandalous we feel immediately compelled to listen attentively and through to the last second.