Inside Track: Shaboozey ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’

‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ has enjoyed record‑breaking success on the Billboard Hot 100.

The biggest hit of the decade so far took Shaboozey and his team half an hour to write — and weeks to perfect.

“It was crazy,” remembers Sean Cook. “It wasn’t a planned thing. It was wild. We were working on ‘Annabelle’, a song on the album, and we were like, ‘Let’s take a break.’ Nevin and I were joking around on guitar, playing whatever chords came to mind, and Shaboozey responded with some words and melodies. In that moment it just happened. We went with it, and boom, the song gods gave us this idea! We weren’t really thinking. For me it was a blur.

“Shaboozey knew right away that we had something special. I also had a gut feeling, and put my iPhone on record and set it to the side. I recorded the whole song being written in a 30‑minute voice memo. Afterwards, in about 15 minutes, we cut Shaboozey’s lead vocal. We later recut a couple lines, but 95 percent of his vocal is from that day, which is shocking because Boozey is very particular with vocals. But he was like, ‘Don’t change it!’”

“Sometimes when making an album,” adds Nevin Sastry, “you’re trying to fill a spot. This was absolutely not that. It was just us having fun, messing around. And it turned out great. In the clip that Sean has on his voice memo while we were writing it, you can hear Shaboozey saying, ‘This is my country number one. I know.’”

Along with Shaboozey himself, Sean Cook and Nevin Sastry were the main production and writing team behind ‘A Bar Song’ and its parent album.

Magic Moment

At that moment in November 2023, the three musicians in the room — Sean Cook, Nevin Sastry and Collins Chibueze, aka Shaboozey — knew they had struck gold. Even so, none of them could have predicted what would follow. At the time of writing, Shaboozey’s ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ has been number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for 15 weeks. By the time you’re reading this, you will know whether ‘A Bar Song’ will have surpassed the current US record of 19 weeks at number one, set in 2019 by another crossover country song, Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ ‘Old Town Road’.

‘A Bar Song’ has made Shaboozey the first black male artist to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and Hot 100 charts at the same time, immediately after Beyoncé had paved the way by becoming the first black artist to do the same with ‘Texas Hold ’Em’. In fact, Beyoncé’s number one album Cowboy Carter, released in March 2024, helped introduce Shaboozey to a wider audience, thanks to guest performances that were in themselves inspired by ‘A Bar Song’. This was the result of a showcase Shaboozey did in January at Winston House in Venice Beach, LA, appearing on stage with Cook and Sastry.

“We were only showcasing four songs,” says Sastry, “and although we had not quite completed the production of ‘A Bar Song’, we decided that we had to perform it. So the three of us performed the song with a backing track that was pretty close to what the world would eventually hear. The reactions were crazy. We saw everybody from everywhere in the bar run to the stage. Shaboozey was still a bit skeptical about the 808 that Sean and I had put at the end of the song, but when he saw the audience reaction when the 808s came in and rumbled the stage, he was like, ‘OK, I get it.’”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” agrees Cook. “When the pre‑chorus started, 20 people immediately walked in from the other room, asking, ‘What song is this?’ It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the energy shift instantly like that! Apparently, the show also led to Shaboozey being invited to appear on her album. That night and that song are such a launching pad for everything, it’s crazy.”

Getting To The Start

As is always the case, the 30 minutes of magic that produced ‘A Bar Song’ were made possible by a long history of production and writing work. “I’m an Indian kid from Ohio,” explains Nevin Sastry. “I started playing piano and guitar when I was 12, and did all the guitar shredding and so on, which led me to jazz. I then went to med school and worked as a doctor, but in 2016, when I was 24, I decided that music was my calling, and moved to LA. I’m a guitarist, writer and producer, and first met Shaboozey in 2016. He ended up moving into my apartment. He signed with Republic that year, and through that I signed with Savan Kotecha, a producer who worked with Max Martin.

“Having come from making beats in my bedroom, pure instinct, I got to learn from the Max Martin crowd! Savan got me to really cut my teeth. I worked on Shaboozey’s first album, Lady Wrangler [2018], but because it was hard to make money through placements, I also did a lot of music for sync. I did all the music for two seasons for a CBBC kids show called Almost Never. I had to write and produce and cut all these covers and mix and master everything for TV. To learn more, I spent a lot of late nights watching YouTube videos and reading Sound On Sound!”

Sean Cook, meanwhile, grew up in Southern California, mostly Sevenoaks and Orange County. “My mum was a vocal teacher and my dad a guitar teacher, and they wanted me to play music in church. I learned to play guitar and bass, and was playing basketball competitively, but after an injury I went into making beats to pass time. My dad said, ‘These are actually pretty good,’ and I got an internship with a producer, which opened me up to the idea of it being a job. I played in a lot of bands in my 20s, but always with a producer brain, wanting to be in the studio writing and producing songs.”

Like Sastry, Cook eventually signed a publishing deal as a songwriter. He first met Shaboozey in 2020, and worked with the artist on his second album, Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die (2022), a title that already revealed clear country inclinations, despite the artist starting out as a rapper. Cook: “When I first met him, he said, ‘I’m from Virginia, and want to have a sound that really represents Virginia.’ He grew up listening to Willie Nelson, but also Young Thug, and wanted to combine both worlds.”

Crossing Boundaries

In 2023, when Cook and Shaboozey were about to start work on the artist’s third album, Shaboozey suggested involving Sastry, who had contributed to one song on Cowboys Live Forever. Sastry recalls that Shaboozey was by now more determined than ever to integrate all his influences, especially country.

“When I first met him, he was wearing a Canadian tuxedo, ie. all denim, and the first thing I heard by him, unreleased, was based on...