Beyoncé released her highly anticipated country album, “Cowboy Carter,” onto streaming platforms on Friday and has already cemented its musical stamp worldwide.
Following the LP’s release, Spotify announced that the renowned singer made history. Her eighth studio album became the music platform’s most-streamed album in 2024 so far, the first country album to achieve that ranking.
Although classified as a country album, the 27-track record blends rock, classical and opera sounds throughout. The BeyHive and other loyal Beyoncé fans — along with some new ones — have applauded her for not sticking to just one genre with her recent project and also breaking barriers in country music in the process.
“The joy of creating music is that there are no rules,” Beyoncé said in a statement. “The more I see the world evolving, the more I felt a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments, and I used very old ones.”
“I didn’t want some layers of instruments like strings, especially guitars, and organs perfectly in tune,” she shared. “I kept some songs raw and leaned into folk. All the sounds were so organic and human, everyday things like the wind, snaps and even the sound of birds and chickens, the sounds of nature.”
Queen Bey also pulled inspiration from Westerns and other films as she displayed rodeo culture in her album images and throughout “Cowboy Carter’s” teasers leading up to its release date. Her creativity stemmed from an array of movies, including “Five Fingers For Marseilles,” “The Harder They Fall,” “Urban Cowboy,” “The Hateful Eight,” “Space Cowboys” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
She wanted “Cowboy Carter” to not only serve as a body of music, but also redefine the status quo by rebuilding the presence of Blacks and people of color in the country’s music landscape. And she clearly succeeded — following up her revered 2022 collection, “Act I: Renaissance,” with a provocative promise that her entire three-part project will be one for the ages.
“This album took over five years,” Beyoncé revealed. “It’s been really great to have the time and the grace to be able to take my time with it. I was initially going to put ‘Cowboy Carter’ out first, but with the pandemic, there was too much heaviness in the world. We wanted to dance. We deserved to dance. But I had to trust God’s timing.”
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