Let Beyonce’s Halftime Show Be a Reminder That ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is One of Beyoncé's Best Albums

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, tomorrow we’re all getting the gift of Beyoncé—which, to be fair, still qualifies as a non-secular experience for some. Queen Bey’s halftime show during the Texans and Ravens game, set to be livestreamed on Netflix, is a big deal for several reasons, chief among them simply being: Beyoncé. (If this were a sports column, we could get into the NFL’s brazen decision to put an end to their longstanding Christmas Day armistice with the NBA by using the best living entertainer in the world as a cheat code, but it isn’t, so we won’t.)

But aside from her shows always being an event because of the maximum effort, spectacle and showmanship she puts into every on-stage experience, tomorrow is extra special because it’ll mark the first time Beyoncé engages with her latest project, an album of the year contender, since releasing it nine months ago. Much like Renaissance, the first album in this planned trilogy, there were no Cowboy Carter visuals. Unlike Renaissance, there was—at press time, at least—no tour, and no other live performances. Aside from a couple of cool Olympics spots and an Instagram reel here or there, when it comes to the Cowboy Carter era, we’ve really only been living with the music.

Which, as she told me (light flex I won’t front) earlier this year, is how she wanted it. “I thought it was important that during a time where all we see is visuals, that the world can focus on the voice,” she said in her GQ cover story. “The music is so rich in history and instrumentation. It takes months to digest, research, and understand. The music needed space to breathe on its own. Sometimes a visual can be a distraction from the quality of the voice and the music. The years of hard work and detail put into an album that takes over four years! The music is enough.”

Very valid, Ms. Knowles-Carter, although you can’t convince me that you didn’t film videos for all 27 songs, complete with cameos from Linda Martell, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson—just for the love of the game—and store them on a hard drive somewhere for posterity.

Still, it’s going to be exciting to finally see these heaters in a new context. The occasion will probably spur those who may not qualify as Beyhive to revisiting Cowboy Carter in full for the first time in a while. And when they do, hopefully they’ll find a new or deeper appreciation for the many wonderful, quieter, multi-layered, idiosyncratic “album cuts” on that project. “Texas” is the big rousing lead single and Record of the Year contender, “II Hands II Heaven” is the superfan consensus best track, “Jolene” is the showy cover, and the Miley and Post Malone duets got their deserved share of attention.

But the Cowboy Carter songs that have endured in my Recently Played just as much if not more, are those quieter songs that may get overshadowed by the bigger tracks. When’s the last time you played “Flamenco?” It’s barely 100 seconds long, yet it’s one of the best examples of this album’s extraordinary ambitions—fusing, as the song title suggests, Spanish folk music with traditional western and country sounds to create a ballad that communicates restlessness, heartbreak and expansive yearning in just over a minute and a half.

I feel just as strongly about “Protector,” the lullaby that finds Bey cooing sweet assurances over a sparse guitar lick that wouldn’t have been out of place in a ruminative scene of Yellowstone. (You can just picture Beth Dutton having a drunken reminiscence about how her mother never loved her while this plays for contrast.) “Even though I know someday you're gonna shine on your own, I will be your projector,” is the kind of brilliantly deceptively simple line that forces you to make the Jay-Z screwface the first time you hear it, taken a level higher by Bey getting fully into her singer-songwriter bag with a well-deployed “mmm” for added emphasis. There’s a tender warmth to it that feels distinctive and independent of past Beyoncé albums or like-minded songs, but also a logical innovation and genuine—not the country costume voters at the CMAs might accuse it of being.

There are gems that strike a balance between contemplative and rousing too, like the stirring “Alligator Tears”—Beyoncé has said she watched a bevy of genre films for inspiration during the course of making the album, and sonically this is the song that plays in the Western as the convoy embarks on the great open road for an uncertain journey. And that chorus: “You say move a mountain/and I'll throw on my boots/You say stop the river from runnin’/I'll build a dam or two/you say change religions now/I spend Sundays with you” is peak Dream.

It’s unclear how long tomorrow’s show is going to be. Some reports say nine minutes, others say it’ll actually be a super-sized show that comes in closer to 20. Undoubtedly, Beyoncé will sneak an evergreen hit or three in there, too. But amidst “Formation” and a high-energy, pyrotechnic rendition of “Spaghetti,” I hope she finds time to work a little “Flamenco” in there—or some nod to the less flashy but still dazzling side of a great album that’s still hitting at the end of the year. And if she doesn’t—well, the music is still enough.