Shaboozey gets ‘Tipsy’ as he brings ‘A Bar Song,’ more to Indianapolis on tour kickoff

If Shaboozey is worried about becoming a one-hit wonder, he sure doesn’t show it on stage.

“Finally Over,” the closing track from his 2024 album “Where I’ve Been Isn’t Where I’m Going,” suggests he is, indeed, concerned: “All my friends have got careers, and mine just might be over, if I don’t sell my soul again for another viral moment.”

But either Shaboozey deserves an Oscar or isn’t that averse to swapping his soul: As he kicked off his Great American Roadshow tour at Old National Centre Sept. 22, he was basking in the glow of that viral moment and having the best time doing it.

To call the viral moment in question the elephant in the room is to dwarf it. “Tipsy (A Bar Song)” is a behemoth: 2024’s undisputed song of the summer and No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for a record-tying 19 weeks from last July to last November. The stomp-clap sing-along closed out Shaboozey’s show in The Egyptian Room at Old National Centre, and he loved every second of it.

“Y’all know what time it is!” he said as the song’s opening strums set in, prompting the sold-out room to raise a glass. “We’re getting tipsy!”

The closer was a victory lap for Shaboozey, capping off the first date of tour with opener Kevin Powers that will take him to 11 more cities across the U.S. before wrapping up in October.

Here’s a little context on Shaboozey. He put out his first album in 2018, but his breakthrough came last year when he punched in a pair of sticky features on Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning album “Cowboy Carter” — “Lucchese see the boots, check. You can hear when I step, step.” He really arrived, though, with “Tipsy (A Bar Song),” a blue-collar drinking anthem that interpolates the era-defining club jam from rapper J-Kwon. That track held steady at No. 1 for those 19 weeks — a feat matched only by Lil Nas X’s inescapable 2019 hit “Old Town Road” — and currently boasts 1.4 billion streams on Spotify.

Why the history lesson? First to remind you how you know this guy, and second to outline the fork in the road that Shaboozey and his viral contemporaries will have to contemplate: When you’re known for one song, do you lean into the moment or make every effort to prove you’re more than that?

The answer in The Egyptian Room was a little bit of both. Shaboozey’s set ran through the bulk of “Where I’m From Isn’t Where I’m Going,” pulling only one of his tracks from before 2024 in “Tall Boy.” Backed by an excellent band complete with a banjo and a fiddle, along with a lighting and effects rig that made the big moments really pop, Shaboozey strolled through his new material while building up to the marquee moment.

The ethos of “A Bar Song” is that the party perseveres despite the life stressors that try to shut it down — a dead-end job or a demanding girlfriend, perhaps. That attitude carried through Shaboozey’s entire set in The Egyptian Room, where he put up a formidable effort to get the party started on, gasp, a Monday night. He kicked off “Drink Don’t Need No Mix” with a shot and wielded a handle of Jack Daniels for the rest of the song, all while prompting the crowd to take a drink with him (with a quick plug for tour sponsor Coors Light for good measure).

By the way: Oh my, good lord, Shaboozey can sing.

He wasn’t pitch perfect, but that voice is a treasure, especially when it hits a money note. He’s rich and buttery, and his songs went down easy like the Jack Daniels he salutes in his big hit. A cover of Hank Williams Jr.’s “Family Tradition” was a particularly pleasant surprise — Shaboozey really did that one justice, and the crowd was game for the unofficial call-and-response the song demands (“Whyyyyyy do you drink? To get drunk!”).

Call-and-response, speaking of, is Shaboozey’s superpower. Nearly every song comes ready-made with a host of “yeah”s and “woah”s to be echoed back to him. Whether audience members knew songs like “Amen” or “Let It Burn” word-for-word didn’t preclude them from participating — the “woah”s and “yeah”s baked into them were easy enough to pick up.

The sing-along of it all ushered in an easy-going air that lingered for most of the show. Shaboozey is in an era of gratitude, and even songs with more serious undertones like “East of the Massannutten” and “Highway” were made lighter by his humility and joy in performing. His earnestness borders on youth pastor, showcased most clearly in his little spiels about his loved ones sticking by him through the tough times and how good things are on the horizon if you just keep at it.

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And I hate to keep talking about “A Bar Song,” but you can’t escape the apex of the show. The audience shift was palpable — phones up, eyes forward, feet two-stepping in time.

We’re not sure how Shaboozey really feels about the hit — his music, remember, seems to hint that he lost a bit of himself in all the commotion. In front of an audience, though, he embraced the song with open arms. The band bled it dry with an extended outro, and Shaboozey kept the goodwill going by sticking around to meet fans and sign merchandise after the house lights went up.

The sobering reality of the kind of explosive success Shaboozey’s currently enjoying is that the ride might end as quickly as it began. We’re watching once-in-a-lifetime stuff unfold, and who knows how long that can last? But on this tour, it looks like Shaboozey’s ready to live in the moment, thrilled to be on the road at all and ready to make the most of the time he has with the crowds to come.

Contact IndyStar Pop Culture Reporter Heather Bushman at [email protected]. Follow her on X @hmb_1013.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Shaboozey kicks off Great American Roadshow in Indianapolis