Grab your bandana and dry your eyes. A month and a half after Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan duetted “Stick Season” and “Mountain With a View” at the ACMs, they've teamed up again for a thoughtful new song: “Cowboys Cry Too.”
Over an easy beat, Ballerini sings about how her husband is “as stubborn as the weeds in the yard” because he's having trouble growing up, while Kahan sings about how you can't get over the pain. “When he shows his skin, lets me in, then he's harder on me,” goes the chorus. “I never knew cowboys cried too.” The pair recorded the vulnerable track with producer/songwriter Alysa Vanderheym.
“In our world and culture and echo chamber of rollers and pretty things, sometimes real feelings start to feel like something you just put aside or push down to keep going,” Ballerini said in a statement. “Especially the way so many men are raised, this kind of toxic masculinity mentality of 'saddle, knock it off.' I wanted to write my perspective and basically celebrate the vulnerable men in my life, and Noah adding his truly unfiltered perspective just brought it to life in a more meaningful and beautiful way.”
Kahan added, “It's the writers who are willing to go to the hard places that inspire me. Kelsea is one of them, and I knew that if we could find something that we both felt like singing, it would expand the way we live, what society decides we should reject. 'Cowboys Cry Too' is everything I thought our collaboration could be.”
Ballerini previously discussed the song Taste of Country Nights. “I wrote the chorus on my back porch last November,” he said. “And I like the idea of writing the song from a female perspective, kind of dealing with toxic masculinity. Then as I was making the whole record and putting the puzzle together, I was like, “Man, if only we could have a male point of view on this, who is willing to go out there and be really emotionally available to write his point of view into the song. that would be amazing.”
Ballerini reached out to Kahan by scrolling through his DMs, according to Taste of Country. Kahan wrote his part while on tour and they recorded it before performing at the ACMs. “He opens his mouth and sings this whole line and I'm just like, 'Oh my God,'” Ballerini said of her appreciation for Kahan. He added of his lyrics: “If you don't deal with the things that live inside you and your emotions and your traumas and your past and whatever, it manifests itself in your life somehow.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/kelsea-ballerini-noah-kahan-cowboys-cry-too-1235047667/
