Cowboy boots are click-clacking on the hardwood floors and hands are up in the air at New York’s Irving Plaza theater on a Wednesday night in September. Onstage, Shaboozey takes a gulp from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to commemorate the sixth stop on his first headliner tour. Nearly an hour later, he walks off and the crowd cries out in unison—despite performing 16 songs, he never played his No. 1 hit, “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and the audience knows what’s coming for an encore. After five minutes, he bounds onto the stage and performs the song—twice.

At 29, Shaboozey has never been happier. Or, at least, he’s never felt an adrenaline rush like this. Born Collins Obinna Chibueze to Nigerian immigrants—his stage name comes from a high school football coach who mispronounced his last name—he left his hometown of Woodbridge, Virginia in pursuit of his musical dreams eight years ago. Not long ago, he was sleeping on couches in Los Angeles, he’s now traveling on his tour bus to greet the thousands of fans coming to watch him perform. He likes to play it cool, but with six Grammy nominations this year—including Best New Artist—the genre-blending musician is finally finding the validation he was looking for after three studio albums.

Hands On: “When I sit with Shaboozey," says Ghazi Shami, the CEO of the Empire label, "I see an entrepreneur who also happens to be a brilliant musician.”

“Some of my friends are in LA to this day and haven’t been able to find that breakthrough for themselves,” says Shaboozey, a 2025 Forbes Under 30 honoree. “I was right about not giving up.”

The newfound success is owed to his big hit, which puts a country spin on J-Kwon’s 2004 hip-hop song “Tipsy.” The track tied the record (at 19 weeks) for the longest-running number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It’s hitting nearly 2 billion streams globally, and SiriusXM alone has aired it 160 million times since the song was released in April. The........

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