‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’: How Shaboozey Improvised the Year’s Biggest Hit, Which Even Caught Beyoncé’s Attention

variety.com:

Mike Wass With nearly 20 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and a quintuple-platinum certification in the U.S. alone, Shaboozey’s genre-blurring “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is the biggest hit of 2024.

It’s a monumental achievement for any artist, let alone an independent one who simply had the audacity to wonder what a country flip of an aughts hip-hop hit — in this case, J-Kwon’s 2004 smash “Tipsy” — might sound like.

The answer, it turns out, is pure ear candy. During a songwriting session with producers Sean Cook and Nevin Sastry, Shaboozey raised the idea of interpolating a vintage rap hit, and soon enough, the seminal J-Kwon lyric “everybody at the bar getting tipsy” flew out of his mouth. “Sean found the chords immediately and just crushed it,” Sastry remembers.

By the time the demo was finished, Shaboozey’s team knew they had something special. A showcase at Winston House in January confirmed the hunch. “The crowd was in an uproar,” co-manager Jared Cotter recalls of the song’s live debut.