Song #10: "Good News" by Shaboozey
Song #10: Shaboozey — “Good News”
Today’s Song
Shaboozey — “Good News” (2024)
My rating: 55/100
Random draw
Era: 2020–present
Verified remaining eligible population: 9,050 recordings
Eligible recordings in selected era: 744
Method: Equal-probability era selection, followed by uniform random selection from the remaining eligible recordings in that era
Chart performance
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #12
Hot 100 debut: #71, November 30, 2024
First project-qualification date: August 9, 2025
Yearly rank (2025): #23
Weeks on Hot 100: 46
Weeks in Top 20: 9
Weeks in Top 10: 0
Weeks at peak: 1
Hot Country Songs peak: #3
Country Airplay peak: #1
Pop Airplay peak: #6
Adult Pop Airplay peak: #5
UK: Did not reach the main Official Singles Chart
Shaboozey at this point
Charting record: 4th of 6
Top-20 hit: 2nd of 2
Top-10 hit: Not a Top-10 hit
#1 hit: Not a #1 hit
Previous Top-20 hit: “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”
Next Top-20 hit: None to date
Retrospective standing
GOAT rank: #6,381
GOAT points: 122,784
Among Shaboozey charting records: 2nd of 6
Among Shaboozey Top-20 hits: 2nd of 2
Record details
Released: November 15, 2024
Running time: 3:19
Label: American Dogwood / EMPIRE
Written by: Collins Obinna Chibueze (Shaboozey), Sean Cook, Nevin Sastry, Jake Torrey, Michael Pollack and Sam Roman
Produced by: Sean Cook and Nevin Sastry
Lead vocal: Shaboozey
Format: Digital single; no conventional B-side
Album: Later included on Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going: The Complete Edition
Exact recording: Original November 2024 recording
Listen / watch / read
Official video: Directed by Logan Meis and released November 15, 2024
Video note: Primarily a performance video, intercut with images of weary and unhappy-looking people. It reinforces the song’s mood more than it expands its meaning.
Lyrics: Available through the usual licensed lyric services
The Hit After The Hit
I knew “Good News.”
Or, more accurately, once I played it, I knew “Good News.”
Before listening, I could vaguely imagine the tune Shaboozey sings with the words “good news,” but that was about it. Once the song started, though, there was no question that I had heard it plenty of times before.
That isn't necessarily a great endorsement.
“Good News” reached #12 on the Hot 100 and spent nine weeks in the Top 20. I listen to the Top 40 all the way through about four times every week, so once it finally got that high, I certainly encountered it repeatedly. And yet, roughly a year later, almost none of it remained in my head until I heard it again.
But “Good News” had an unusual problem from the moment it was released.
Shaboozey's previous single was still #1.
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” entered the Hot 100 in April 2024, reached #1 in July and then stayed there for 19 nonconsecutive weeks, tying the record at the time for the longest stay at #1. “Good News” debuted at #71 on the chart dated November 30, 2024.
That was the exact week “A Bar Song” spent its 19th and final week at #1.
There was literally no gap between Shaboozey's monster breakthrough and its follow-up. “Good News” arrived while the first hit was still at its absolute chart peak.
The contrast with yesterday's song is striking.
In 1965, Gary Lewis and the Playboys' “This Diamond Ring” came from an era when a hit single was a rapidly depreciating commercial asset. Once Liberty Records realized Gary Lewis had a smash, the incentive was essentially:
Quick, give them another one.
The streaming era creates almost the opposite problem.
When a record becomes as enormous as “A Bar Song,” it doesn't necessarily disappear after a few months. People can keep streaming it indefinitely. Radio can keep playing it. Playlists can keep serving it. The commercial incentive isn't necessarily to replace the hit as quickly as possible. It can instead be:
Don't interrupt them. They're still consuming this one.
“Good News” therefore spent much of its life living in the shadow of its predecessor.
And that shadow lasted an absurdly long time.
The Slowest Follow-Up
“Good News” did not behave like a conventional follow-up single.
It debuted at #71 and then went nowhere.
For its first 17 weeks on the Hot 100, it never climbed higher than #47. It spent months bouncing around the bottom half of the chart. It didn't even reach the Top 40 until its 21st week, when it climbed to #34.
Then it continued bouncing around.
The real climb didn't begin until the summer of 2025. It went from #39 to #30, briefly slipped to #32, then moved through #29, #26, #24, #22, #17, #15 and #13 before finally reaching #12 in its 39th week on the chart.
This appears to have been driven less by some sudden viral event than by an extraordinarily slow radio build. “Good News” didn't even enter Billboard's Country Airplay chart until February 2025. Country radio gradually embraced it through the spring, pop radio joined in, and by late summer it had become a major radio record. It eventually reached #1 on Country Airplay, #6 on Pop Airplay and #5 on Adult Pop Airplay.
The weirdest part is that “A Bar Song” was still there.
On the chart dated August 30, 2025, “Good News” finally reached its #12 peak.
“A Bar Song,” in its 71st week, was #13.
For exactly one week, the follow-up finally beat the monster that came before it.
Then “A Bar Song” moved ahead again.
There may not be a better illustration of the problem “Good News” faced. It took 39 weeks to reach its peak, finally passed the previous Shaboozey single, and the previous Shaboozey single was still strong enough to pass it right back.
“A Bar Song” ultimately lasted 77 weeks on the Hot 100. “Good News” lasted 46.
Neither really died naturally.
Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl dropped all 12 of its tracks into the Hot 100's top 12 in October 2025, shoving the existing chart downward. That pushed “A Bar Song” across Billboard's then-existing recurrent threshold and ended its 77-week run.
“Good News” survived the Taylor tidal wave for one additional week, falling from #23 to #34. Then Billboard tightened its recurrent rules the following week, and a 46-week-old song sitting below #25 was suddenly eligible for removal.
And that was that.
There is something slightly perverse about modern charts here. I tend to develop song fatigue after about 26 weeks. A song can be perfectly good, but after six months of hearing it several times a week, I am usually ready for something else.
The modern Hot 100 is increasingly capable of saying:
Too bad. Here are another 40 weeks.
That may be one reason I have a strange love/hate relationship with the modern “album bomb.” I hate the week when one artist releases an album and suddenly occupies an enormous chunk of the Top 40. But those weeks can also function like tidal waves. They disrupt a chart that has settled into equilibrium, push older songs across recurrent thresholds, and then many of the album tracks themselves disappear. A week or two later, the chart can actually feel fresher.
The album bomb clogs the chart—and then sometimes helps unclog it.
So Is Shaboozey a One-Hit Wonder?
This is where “Good News” gets especially interesting to me.
I have always been fascinated by the second hit after an act has an enormous first one.
A-ha had “Take on Me,” and then “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” The latter only reached #20 in the United States, but I love it. These follow-up records answer a question the monster hit cannot:
Did people like the artist, or did they just like that one song?
By any normal standard, “Good News” was a hit. A #12 single with nine weeks in the Top 20 is not a failed follow-up.
But culturally?
I suspect “Good News” is destined to become “that other Shaboozey song after ‘A Bar Song’”—assuming people remember it at all.
That raises the old one-hit-wonder problem.
Chart historian Chris Molanphy once proposed a useful set of rules for defining a one-hit wonder. A second Top-10 hit clearly gets an act out. A later Top-40 hit generally does too, although Molanphy created an exception for an immediate follow-up that arrives within six months and is never followed by another Top-40 hit—the idea being that such a record might simply be riding the coattails of the breakthrough.
“Good News” is an interesting stress test for that rule because the streaming era can make the coattails last an awfully long time.
The song that probably gets Shaboozey out under Molanphy's system isn't “Good News” at all. It's the later Shaboozey and Jelly Roll collaboration “Amen,” which reached #27.
Yet I would guess that, right now, if you asked a random group of people whether Shaboozey was a one-hit wonder, a lot of them would say yes—and a much smaller number could name “Amen” as the technical reason he isn't.
His career is still being written. As of today, “Cowgirl” is climbing the Hot 100 and has reached #43. Maybe this entire discussion will look ridiculous in five years.
That's part of the fun of drawing a current artist. When we discussed Starland Vocal Band and “Afternoon Delight,” we already knew what happened. Here, we're catching the story before the ending has been written.
Country Invades the Hot 100
There is another reason “Good News” feels historically interesting.
Five or ten years earlier, would this record have reached #12?
I'm not sure.
Country music and the Hot 100 have always overlapped, but they have historically operated as somewhat different economies. A country artist could become an enormous star through country radio, album sales, touring and the country charts without necessarily dominating the all-genre Hot 100.
Country radio did count toward the Hot 100. But historically, for a country record to become a really enormous Hot 100 hit, it generally needed to break beyond country radio—usually onto pop radio—or generate unusually strong sales.
Streaming has changed the geometry.
Country was relatively slow to adopt on-demand audio streaming compared with other major genres. Beginning around 2020, however, that started changing quickly, particularly among younger country listeners. By 2023, the difference had become impossible to miss.
I tried a simple way of measuring it.
The Top 20 contains 20 positions. Over 52 weeks, that's 1,040 available Top-20 positions. So I counted how many of those positions each year were occupied by records classified as country.
The results:
| Year | Country Top-20 slot-weeks | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 10 | 1.0% |
| 2017 | 31 | 3.0% |
| 2018 | 33 | 3.2% |
| 2019 | 22 | 2.1% |
| 2020 | 82 | 7.9% |
| 2021 | 51 | 4.9% |
| 2022 | 74 | 7.1% |
| 2023 | 224 | 21.5% |
| 2024 | 244 | 23.5% |
| 2025 | 229 | 22.0% |
That is a remarkable change.
From 2016 through 2022, country occupied about 4.2% of the available Top-20 positions in an average year.
From 2023 through 2025, it occupied about 22.3%.
The obvious break is 2023.
This isn't simply “country suddenly became popular.” Country was already enormously popular. What changed was the degree to which country consumption translated directly into points on the all-genre chart.
Streaming increasingly put the country-music economy and the Hot 100 economy inside the same circle.
“Good News” sits squarely inside that transformation.
It eventually became a genuine pop-radio crossover, so I don't want to pretend streaming alone dragged it to #12. But its bizarre 39-week crawl toward its peak is very much a product of this new environment: country radio, pop radio and streaming could gradually accumulate until a song that had spent months looking like a minor chart entry became a substantial Hot 100 hit.
Five years earlier, perhaps it still would have reached the Top 40. But #12 would have been a considerably tougher climb.
The Song
After all of that chart history, there is still the actual record.
And “Good News” is better than my memory of it.
It begins with Shaboozey and an acoustic guitar. Rather than immediately throwing the entire production at us, the arrangement introduces elements one at a time.
Pedal steel appears fairly early. At one point Shaboozey dismisses another miserable guy at the bar with the “tiny violin” idea—and, appropriately, a fiddle enters the arrangement.
The chorus is where the record first expands significantly. The percussion arrives with the familiar stomp-and-clap sound associated with a certain strain of folk-pop. Then the song pares itself back again for the next verse rather than simply continuing to get bigger.
Eventually, roughly two-thirds of the way through, backing singers arrive with actual “hey” and “ho” vocals.
At that point it becomes almost impossible for me not to think of the Lumineers' “Ho Hey.”
That's not necessarily a criticism. I don't have the visceral hatred for stomp-clap music that some people do. But once my brain makes the connection, it takes me slightly outside “Good News.”
Something similar happens lyrically when Shaboozey uses the image of trying to drown his sorrows only to discover that they can swim. I love that image, but I already associate it strongly with U2's “Until the End of the World.” Again, instead of pulling me further into Shaboozey's song, it momentarily sends me somewhere else.
That's too bad, because the lyrics themselves are quite bleak and interesting.
This is a narrator who seems a little broken by life.
He drinks, but the drinking isn't helping. Somebody else at the bar wants to tell him how bad his own life is, and Shaboozey essentially doesn't care. He has so little emotional bandwidth remaining that somebody else's misery is merely irritating.
And yet the record doesn't feel hopeless.
That's the tension I like most.
When “Good News” was released, Shaboozey described the song as being for people feeling the weight of the world's problems. He said that even in dark moments there is still hope and that sometimes people simply need a little light.
That fits the record—but I don't hear its optimism as:
Life is going to be OK.
It's much smaller than that.
It's more like:
Life won't be totally black.
The narrator isn't asking for everything to be fixed. He isn't even particularly confident that things will improve. He just wants somebody to give him one piece of good news. One little bit of light would be enough.
The arrangement seems to embody that idea. It starts with one lonely guy and an acoustic guitar. Gradually the world fills in around him: pedal steel, fiddle, percussion, stomps, claps, other voices.
Then, at the end, it all goes away.
We're back to Shaboozey and the acoustic guitar.
The song has come full circle. His problems haven't been solved. He's still essentially where he began.
But maybe things aren't completely dark.
Final Verdict: 55/100
“Good News” is a decent song.
That's faint praise, but I don't mean it dismissively. The closer I listened, the more things I found to appreciate. The arrangement is thoughtfully constructed. The lyrics are darker than the relatively buoyant production initially suggests. And the tiny amount of optimism buried inside all that misery gives the record more emotional complexity than I remembered.
But I appreciate it more than I love it.
Part of the problem is simply that I can't relate very strongly to someone who feels quite this beaten down by life. I've had bad periods. I've never felt that bad.
And then there's the memory test.
I heard this record repeatedly when it was a hit. A year later, I knew that I had heard it, but couldn't really reconstruct it until I pressed play.
Once it started, I remembered it immediately.
That may ultimately be “Good News”'s fate more generally.
It followed a record that spent 19 weeks at #1. It reached a perfectly respectable #12 itself. It survived for 46 weeks. It crossed from country into pop radio. It arrived at a fascinating moment in the changing relationship between country music and the Hot 100.
And most people are probably going to remember it, if they remember it at all, as:
“Oh yeah. That was the song Shaboozey had after ‘A Bar Song.’”
That's kind of too bad.
Because on its own, “Good News” is pretty decent.
55/100.
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