I Went to the cowboy carter tour

When I think of Beyonce I, now at least, first think of my dear friend Ericka Jones who was the biggest Beyonce fan I knew in real life. Sneakers and Beyonce - if she didn’t love anything else in this world she loved those two things. Beyonce to her was what FKA twigs was to me in my early 20s and if you know anything about me, you know that means a lot. Ericka was a coworker, but she quickly became my big sister, calling me her annoying little brother and making sure I had the best deals on open-box tvs at Best Buy after the Microsoft Store we worked at closed down. Ericka passed away in 2023, much too young, and before I could scream with her about how good the Renaissance Tour was. I still miss her dearly.

But I enjoyed Beyonce far before Ericka and I started working together in 2014. I enjoyed Beyonce in Destiny’s Child, especially around the time the “Bootylicious” Remix video came out. “Check Up On It” and “Green Light” were my earliest true entries into the fandom. B’Day will always be my favorite album, and I will always speak to the power it shows that Beyonce released such a powerful package in such a short time as her sophomore project. As an artist the sophomore blues is a very real thing, but Beyonce’s B’Day - her first visual album in my opinion - has aged so well giving us hit after hit unlike any of her peers, then and now.

When Cowboy Carter came out in 2024 I was going through a major transition quitting a toxic job, leaving New York and moving back to Baltimore, meanwhile dealing with the coming loss of my maternal grandmother Precious. That year I found myself visiting South Carolina frequently. I went back home to my own roots of Florence and Effingham to assist with her needs in the hospital with this album soundtracking that moment in my life.

I don’t have as many videos with my grandmother as I’d like, but one of my favorite ones that I do have is just us two riding on the way to the Amtrak station in her black pickup truck. I was her errand buddy. Whether it was to the Salvation Army for old National Geographic magazines, to Freeman’s Bakery for cake squares, Little Caesar’s for the $5 pizza, Krispy Kreme on Irby Street, or the little things we did - in the grey Silverado, the blue Expedition (that my grandma called Blue) - I was her shotgun rider. I didn’t realize how much I missed riding around with my grandma until I started having to call Ubers to get back and forth from the train station to her house.

And so it only made sense that “II Most Wanted” was the song I had to skip. I played the song leaving MUSC once in April to walk to Waffle House for the fourth time, barely crossing Freedom Boulevard before before breaking down in tears, stopping and holding onto a nearby tree. I was losing my best friend soon  and I knew it. She’d been refusing to drink the Juven drinks and stopped eating the good hospital food. Reading grief subreddits prepared me for the moment years ago, but now it was getting visibly closer. And there I was holding on to this tree, bawling into the next song.

From “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” to it’s reprise “AMEN”, Cowboy Carter is up there with B’Day, Renaissance, and The Gift for my favorite Beyonce productions. It only made sense to go to the tour as I had for Renaissance. And as destiny had it these things aligned. My 30th birthday gift to myself was to see Beyonce in my favorite city in the US - Chicago. My 29th birthday was the same date as my grandmother’s memorial service - intentionally. I wanted to honor her that way. And then my great-uncle, her brother, passed away the day before my 28th birthday - hence me giving her my 29th to allow the easiest time for family to come together and honor them both.

The day before my 30th birthday my Sony A7C broke with a chipped SD card damaging the pins in the camera. If anyone wants to help fund the repair my cashapp is $jercollins. I rushed to Central Camera the next day - my actual birthday - to purhcase a cheap reusable film camera and a roll of Ektar Gold before going to Milwaukee with my mom to visit my cousins and paternal grandma. The next day was the day I would see Beyonce for the second time - with Precious, Ericka, that fuckass job, Florence, Effingham, and grief all up in my mind and heart. This of course, caused me to pour tears just moments into the opening as she performed “AMERIICAN REQUIEM”. The good news is, by the time she got to “II Most Wanted” I had no tears left to cry. And even better, I can now listen to the song without the heaviness of grief.