Take yourself back to 2015 for a second, and imagine someone came up to you and said, "That kid who made 'White Iverson' -- nine years from now he's going to be one of the biggest country music stars on the planet." Maybe it'd seem inconceivable. But even then there was plenty of reason and evidence to believe Post Malone could pull off exactly the kind of country pivot he has in 2024.
So far this summer, he's had not only the biggest song in country, but the biggest song in the country: "I Had Some Help," his hit collaboration with Morgan Wallen, spent five straight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 (finally unseated by Sabrina Carpenter's "Please Please Please"); it remains at Number One on the Hot Country Songs chart; and it became the fastest song to reach Number One on the Country Airplay chart since Garth Brooks' 2007 song "More Than a Memory."
Malone has since followed "I Had Some Help" with another blockbuster collaboration -- "Pour Me a Drink" with Blake Shelton -- and both songs will appear on Malone's upcoming album, F-1 Trillion (out Aug. 16). He's also announced a tour in support of the country LP, which will kick off in September.
Malone has navigated this new era with aplomb, steadily wading into the often cloistered world of Nashville, and "paying his dues," so to speak, with awards show performances, tasteful tributes, and classic covers. He even checked his ego at the door to play an intimate writer's round at Nashville's Bluebird Cafe. Nothing about his embrace of country music seems cynical or calculated -- not that anything about Post Malone's career has ever -- and that largely has to do with the fact that he's been a genuine fan of this music for years.
With F-1 Trillion still a few weeks away, Posty's Big Country Summer is just getting started. In the meantime, here's a look back at all the times Post Malone's gone country.
Though born in Syracuse, New York, Post Malone primarily grew up in Grapevine, Texas, outside of Dallas. A 2019 local news report for CBS Texas looked into Posty's Lone Star State roots, highlighting some of the earliest gigs a young Austin Post played at an Italian restaurant in town while still in high school. "He played a lot of Southern rock, a lot of country, which you wouldn't expect from him now, but he did a great job," recalled the restaurant's general manager, Jaime Gage.
Like any aspiring musician coming of age in the 2010s, Post posted videos of himself playing music online. And one of the clips that still survives today on the "Posty Malone" YouTube channel is him covering Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." Dylan's 1963 classic might be a bit more folk than country, but it offers a clear look at the kind of music Malone was drawn to at the outset of his career.
There's also another deep cut video floating around of Malone covering Hank Williams' "There's a Tear in My Beer." The version that's on YouTube was uploaded in 2018, but based on the lack of tattoos on Malone's face, it was probably recorded a few years before then.
Even after pivoting to hip-hop and blowing up with "White Iverson," Malone never shied from talking up his love of country music. In an October 2015 interview with Hot 97 in October 2015, he said, "I put myself on country whenever I started playing guitar," and stated his aspirations plainly: "I'ma get a rhinestone suit and a guitar strap with my name on it."
This was a huge year for Post Malone, mostly because of "Sunflower," his inescapable smash with Swae Lee from the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack (a song that even captured the affections of Sturgill Simpson, who recorded himself playing a bluegrass version of the tune in 2020). But 2018 also marked the year Malone really started to embrace country music more publicly.
In February of that year, Toby Keith shared a video on social media of him, Posty, and Waterloo Revival jamming out a version of the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller-penned classic "Kansas City" (made famous by Wilbert Harrison). Then in May, he popped up at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, one of the most famous, and longest-running honky-tonks on Nashville's Lower Broadway. Malone reportedly played a handful of covers, though the only video evidence of his surprise set is a snippet of his rendition of Elvis Presley's "That's Alright Mama."
About a month later, Post Malone appeared as a guest on Dwight Yoakam's SiriusXM radio show, where the pair broke out the acoustic guitars and performed several songs together. Their stripped-down set included renditions of Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," Merle Haggard's "The Bottle Let Me Down," and Yoakam's own "A Thousand Miles From Nowhere."
At the top of 2019, Post Malone took part in a special 50th anniversary tribute to Elvis Presley's landmark 1968 comeback special. He performed three times, starting out the evening with a duet of "Baby, What You Want Me to Do" alongside Keith Urban. Later, he performed "Blue Suede Shoes" with the evening's host, Blake Shelton, and he helped close out the special as part of the all-star rendition of "If I Can Dream" alongside Shelton, Carrie Underwood, Shawn Mendes, and Darius Rucker.
While this was an extremely country evening for Malone, he may have arguably outdone himself a few months later when he headlined Bonnaroo. No, his set wasn't speckled with country covers, but he took the stage wearing an outfit emblazoned with the legendary face of Dolly Parton. (Parton, for her part, was flattered, tweeting, "Love the outfit from head to toe @PostMalone.")
Then, later in the year, Malone found himself on the receiving end of a very country honor when Shania Twain included a short cover of his song "Rockstar" in her performance at the American Music Awards. "I was so honored that she just threw it into the compilation a little bit," Malone told Yahoo a few months later in early 2020. "One of my managers told me, 'Hey, Shania wants to cover one of your songs tonight,' and I was so, so ecstatic and excited."
In that same interview, Malone spoke about his longtime love of "old-school Nudie suits and Hank Sr.-type country music," adding: "I don't see why I wouldn't mess around and mash something together, and just have fun with it," he says. "I make a bunch of different songs, some of which that will never come out, just for fun. I've made some country songs, some rock songs... you never know whenever I might get some inspiration and just say, 'Hey, let's put this out now.'"
During this two-year span, Malone was primarily focused on making, releasing, and promoting his fourth album, Twelve Carat Toothache, which arrived in June 2022. But he still found plenty of time to dabble in the country world and set the stage for what was to come.
Arguably the moment he made his ambitions abundantly clear was when he took part in Matthew McConaughey's "We're Texas" fundraiser in March 2021. Backed by members of Dwight Yoakam's band, Malone covered Brad Paisley's 2002 hit "I'm Gonna Miss Her," as well as Sturgill Simpson's "You Can Have the Crown." Paisley was deeply impressed, writing on Instagram afterwards, "Always humbling when another artist does your song better than you."
When Malone recirculated the clip on TikTok a year later, Paisley expressed his admiration again, prompting Post to to reply: "I love you so fuckin' much man, thank you for the love, dude. I owe you a beer, man. Text me, I'll see you soon." Paisley then changed his TikTok bio to read: "I write songs for Post Malone."
Also, in 2021, Malone covered Hootie and the Blowfish's 1995 country-adjacent hit "Only Wanna Be With You" to celebrate (of all things) the 25th anniversary of Pokémon. And he also shared a clip of him singing Randy Travis' "Forever and Ever, Amen," on TikTok.
Travis later popped up backstage at the Nashville stop of the "12 Carat Tour" in 2022, where he, Posty, Luke Bryan, and Billy Strings were photographed playing beer pong. Just a few months before that, Malone had joined Strings onstage in Santa Ana, California, for a cover of the Western swing classic "Cocaine Blues," made famous by Johnny Cash.
Speaking with Howard Stern in June 2022, Malone again addressed the possibility of a country record: "There's nothing stopping me from taking a camera, or setting up in my studio in Utah, and just recording a country album, and me just putting it on fucking YouTube," he said. "There's nothing stopping me. Maybe I'll face some repercussions afterward from the label and shit, but there's nothing stopping me from doing that."
Malone went on to say he was "happily obligated" to keep making, recording, and touring the kind of pop-hip-hop hybrid that made him famous, but did hint at the possibility of doing something down the road. "It's a lot of time and it's about finding that space to allot that time," he said. "If I get another year to myself, maybe I'll make a fucking country album."
Malone quickly followed up Twelve Carat Toothache with 2023's Austin, which was definitely a guitar-driven effort but not necessarily -- as Rolling Stone pointed out in its review -- a rock record (let alone a country record). Still, Malone seemed to hint at where he was headed creatively when he appeared on NPR's Tiny Desk Concert series, where he was backed by a full band and string section, delivering rootsier renditions of hits like "Sunflower," "I Fall Apart," "Circles," and "Enough Is Enough."
By fall 2023, Malone officially planted his country flag. In September, it was announced that he would deliver a set of country covers at the 2024 Stagecoach festival. Then a couple months later, he made his CMA Awards debut alongside Morgan Wallen and Hardy, performing a medley of Nineties country hits penned by the late songwriter Joe Diffie.
That same week of the CMA Awards, Malone also seemed to get a bit of work in. The singer-songwriter Ernest posted a photo of himself and Wallen in the studio with Malone, while the songwriter James McNair also revealed on social media that he, Malone, and Luke Combs were working on something together.
This is all recent history, of course, but Malone's still done so much before even hitting the halfway mark of 2024. To start, he joined Beyoncé on "Levii's Jeans," off her country album, Cowboy Carter; then before his Stagecoach set, he took the stage at one of country's most hallowed venues, Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, where he covered Hank Williams' 1952 track "Honky Tonk Blues."
At Stagecoach in late April, Malone did not disappoint. His set featured a bunch of cameos, including Brad Paisley, who helped Posty perform "I'm Gonna Miss Her," Vince Gill's "One More Last Chance," and Alan Jackson's "Chattahoochee." Yoakam also took the stage for "Little Ways," and Sara Evans appeared for "Suds in the Bucket." Malone's set included covers of songs by Tyler Childers, Tim McGraw, Randy Travis, George Strait, and Toby Keith.
Things moved pretty fast after that: Malone and Wallen released "I Had Some Help" in May, and a few weeks later Malone performed the song solo -- plus a still-unreleased track, "Never Love You Again" -- at the Academy of Country Music Awards. After playing "I Had Some Help," Reba McEntire appeared on stage, and she and Malone delivered an impromptu tribute to Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band with an a cappella rendition of "Ramblin' Man."
Next, in June, Malone made the rounds at CMA Fest in Nashville, partnering with Shelton to perform "Pour Me a Drink" not once, but twice (the song's official release was still a few weeks away). And while Malone largely returned to his old hits during his sets at Governors Ball and Bonnaroo, he did bring out Billy Strings at the latter to play on two Beerbongs and Bentleys tunes, "Rockstar" and "Stay." A few days later, he appeared at another Nashville institution, the Bluebird Cafe, where he played an intimate set alongside Lainey Wilson, Ashley Gorley, and Ernest.
Then, at long last, Malone finally announced his country album, F-1 Trillion via a big ol' billboard in Nashville. There's still not a lot known about the album, which is slated to be 18 tracks long, leaving a lot of room for special guests and collaborations. The only thing that's for sure? There's more yee-haw to come.
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