Shaboozey is describing his upcoming album, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales, as the most personal and ambitious project of his career, one he says has been years in the making and pulls from classic Greek storytelling traditions.
“It’s kinda like my magnum opus,” he says. “It’s something I’ve … been conceptualizing for almost like the later part of my life, wanting to bring my love of storytelling and films into an album.”
Rather than a standard collection of songs, the singer says the record is built as a single, continuous story. “The whole album, from top to bottom, follows this narrative about a farm girl looking for revenge against a group of outlaws who kinda took the things she loves the most, the things that she holds dear to her,” he explains.
He points to ancient literature as a touchstone for the project’s structure and scope. “It’s just honestly like a saga, you know, being inspired by like [The] Iliad, Homer, like The Odyssey and all those Greek epics,” Shaboozey continues, “and wanting to just do a Western in an album form, really trying to just like challenge myself to see if I can pull it off.”
Bringing that vision to life wasn’t easy, according to the artist, but he believes the final product delivers on his goal. “I say it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I think we did it,” he adds.
The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales is set for release on July 31 and will follow Shaboozey’s 2024 breakthrough single, “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which helped push him into the country mainstream and became one of the year’s biggest crossover hits. The new project marks a shift from that earlier commercial success toward a more narrative-driven, cinematic body of work, with the artist framing it as a deliberate evolution rather than a repeat of past formulas.
By anchoring the album’s structure to epic storytelling traditions, Shaboozey is positioning the release as a statement project, one crafted to showcase his range as a songwriter and storyteller beyond the viral success that first brought him to a wider audience. Fans can expect the full narrative, focused on the character Cherie Lee, to unfold across the album’s tracklist when it drops later this month.
