The Singles Jukebox

You guessed it! (…did you?) It’s B’Day! Let’s end it off strong…

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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: An exponentially stronger B-side to the paint-by-numbers honky-tonk of “Texas Hold ‘Em,” “16 Carriages” is reminiscent of the widescreen ballads that Beyoncé hasn’t made in some time. There have been slow songs and Quiet Storm tributes, but few all-ages Bold Metaphor jams to flick your lighters up to. Usually, this isn’t my favourite of Knowles’ modes (give it up for a day-one “Halo” sceptic), but the frayed-family narrative and arena-size swell are moving. Compared to “Break My Soul” and its eye-rolling lyrics about quitting dead-end jobs, “16 Carriages” doesn’t make me balk at one of the world’s richest women singing about being “underpaid and overwhelmed.” In its earnest hugeness, you can feel the artist reach for the mythic, or a theatrical archetype at the least. It’s strong character work.
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Rachel Saywitz: After an album bereft of slow-churning, sob-inducing ballads, it’s very satisfying to hear Beyoncé back in her element with “16 Carriages.” There’s a gorgeous tension to it, a slow buildup rich with narrative interiors—regardless of whether the track is pulled directly from Beyoncé’s life, its story shows in blistered verses frantic with stormy memories and repeated affirmations. I can sense, in her melodies and vocal runs, that there’s a rush to race ahead of the track’s patient lap steel and slow percussion thumps. Her voice grows in power so gradually that when the anticipation finally reaches its peak in that final chorus, it’s hard to feel relief. I want to keep living in the epic fantasy of the song’s tale, where strife is rewarded and fear begets a legacy. 
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Hannah Jocelyn: “16 Carriages” is billed as country, but it reminds me more of maximalist chamber pop like Perfume Genius’ No Shape with its drastic dynamic shifts and off-kilter orchestration. Beyoncé’s performance is virtuosic in its relative restraint, letting the crashing horns and strings do the heavy lifting. (Good singing =/= belting everything!) She recasts her history as an underdog story and sells it — and for what it’s worth, getting famous at an early age actually sounds pretty traumatizing! The oddly lo-fi production grounds the narrative. This obviously isn’t a truly unpolished Beyoncé — this is more self-mythologizing — but it’s great storytelling and worldbuilding. “Carriages” can’t be narrowed down, always eluding any easy genre tag or even any easy answers in the lyrics. It’s been a while since a pop star released something this weird, and even longer since they pulled it off.
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Jeffrey Brister: This one feels more in line with my expectations. “16 Carriages” isn’t perfect—it has a repetitive melody, doesn’t do nearly enough with the bluesy vocal, and feels a lot longer than its 3:53—but there’s enough to make it a distinctively country song. It also makes some smart choices with arrangements and productions — the slight crunch and airy decay on the drums giving it an off-kilter feel, smartly knowing when to crash into climaxes and pull away to the spare beauty that shows off Bey’s voice.
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Dorian Sinclair: Releasing “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” simultaneously was smart. Where the former is gleefully cluttered, “16 Carriages” is stripped-back and stately, letting the lead vocal line carry the track almost entirely on its own. It’s a risky gambit; the melody is repetitive, and without a commanding performance the song could easily feel stagnant. But we know Beyoncé can deliver a commanding performance, and she does so here, with a precise understanding of how to execute on all those little flutters, and how to make the moments when the melody does break out of its limited range and climb a little higher really feel exciting. It all works right up until the last 45 seconds or so — introducing a new melodic idea so late in the song makes the whole thing feel kind of formless and unstructured and the ending feel notably untidy. This might make more sense on the album, but for now it’s unresolved.
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Aaron Bergstrom: It’s been almost fifteen years since 30 Rock taught us that “going country” is a totally legitimate career move, and yet I confess that abrupt genre-hopping still makes me question an artist’s motives. It’s easy to see the commercial justification for Beyoncé finding new worlds to conquer, and I do love that a Black woman succeeding in country music makes some of the worst people in the world tie themselves in knots trying to explain why they’re (a) mad about it but (b) somehow not racist. Still, if all we’re doing is running it back with banjo instead of house piano, then I can’t say I’m all that invested. Luckily, “16 Carriages” shows that there’s also an artistic justification: country music can be such a compelling medium for storytelling. This is a song that needs to shake off the dust before it gets going, a song that needs to unfurl itself, unhurried in its presentation. It evokes weatherbeaten grandeur and the way that an unbroken horizon can signify both freedom and isolation, both possibility and emptiness. It drags in places and never reaches a real emotional climax, both of which could be seen as purposeful artistic choices. But ultimately it’s undaunted, or at least as undaunted as you can be when it feels like your dreams are escaping. 
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TA Inskeep: First of all, this ain’t country just because it has some acoustic finger picking in it. This sounds more Lumineers-core to my ears, especially the way it gets stompy as the arrangement gets bigger and swells with strings near its end. The lyric could be more effective with better music and a less sweet vocal. Maybe bring it back for that purported “rock” album and let Jack White go loose, encourage Beyoncé to go full Tina Turner — that’d work.
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Brad Shoup: Genius is calling this a “classic country anthem,” which may be true if your classic country stops at “An American Trilogy”. When the symphony blares down the steel, it feels like the song taking its true intended form. She’s going asking it to hold up so much, so quickly: origin story and present-day triumph and private burdens. That may be the most classic country thing about it, actually.
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Taylor Alatorre: “16 Carriages” is a songwriting case study in the power of selective ambiguity. Why carriages, and why 16 of them, when Beyoncé gives 15 as the age by which her innocence had “gone astray”? Part of it could be the centrality of the “sweet sixteen” in American girlhood, but that hardly seems like the whole story, especially when the song is bent on depicting the precise opposite of a normal American adolescence. The subsequent use of “umpteen,” an ungainly word that Beyoncé seems to roll her eyes through, confirms that this is not about a specific moment of lost innocence but a larger, hazier sense of loss that weaves its way through the cracks in one’s life, lying dormant and then springing back up at unexpected moments. A long train of carriages riding off into the sunset is a dream image, some mirage-like melding of Wild West and rock ‘n’ roll mythology that hits at something primal and almost beyond naming. The passing of childhood, yes, but more specifically the closing off of a universe of choices that were once available to us and no longer are. This being a Beyoncé single, the mourning is laced with the requisite triumphalism, but this doesn’t negate the message that every worldly gain is built upon worldly loss but strengthens it. Those bone-rattling surges of guitar and percussion, at once funereal and propulsive, provide the ideal frame for this balancing act, jolting us back and forth between reality and the reverie. We never find out exactly what dreams are being carried away by the carriages, but that’s fine — all the better to universalize this inherently exceptional case of the self-sacrificing celebrity.
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Jackie Powell: Ever since Beyoncé released “Formation” and subsequently Lemonade, a common criticism emerged about what her brand stands for, and a question was posed: can she currently relate to the stories about being a Black person in America? Ernest Owens’ column from eight years ago makes points that remain relevant. “Just know that Beyoncé is making bank off of a variation of blackness that she isn’t currently living in or experiencing,” he wrote. With Renaissance, released six years later, there were questions about how Beyoncé could earnestly lean into the plight and earn profit from the Black queer folks that Renaissance pays tribute to. And with “16 Carriages,” a track written like a modern day “work song,” how does that factor into that discourse? Putting it simply, Beyoncé has struggled with being relatable, but “16 Carriages” challenges that. What was her life like before the millions of dollars and even before Destiny’s Child? I didn’t really know until now. She writes of sacrifice, something that is a part of everyday life for all. And she also writes of the struggles that people who choose a life of creative work are accustomed to. “Goin’ so hard, gotta choose myself/Underpaid and overwhelmed.” That’s so real. “Sixteen dollars, workin’ all day/Ain’t got time to waste, I got art to make.” That’s also so real. “16 Carriages” is written like a poem in couplets, with Beyoncé placing accents after each clause or phrase. The most important words that she wants you to take away are what she accents. It’s intentional, just like a lot of the recent Beyoncé story. Could this be Beyoncé’s “Jenny from the Block?” It might be, but it’s a bit more sincere and much less silly. Beyoncé knows she’s not that professional teenager anymore.
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Nortey Dowuona: Atia Boggs once wrote the hook “oh, I don’t recall, all the tears of them all, the children of men, children of men.“ She also wrote: “baby, I might let you go, baby, baby no matter what, and like I switch the other side of me, baby gotta lotta ride on me.” She has been writing songs that take all sorts of shapes, but she is credited on this song, and those two feel close to it. The first is a Trae the Truth record where he and J. Cole tell sad stories of young black men being sucked into the prison system, and the hook memorializes their lives. The second is a trippy Childish Gambino acid trip with a girl with a cat who looks at him sideways and has a little ride on her — which Boggs sings about before her words are once again cut up and scattered to the winds. “It’s been umpteen summers, and I’m not in my bed, on the back of the bus in a bunk with the band.” I figure that a longtime songwriter like Boggs and Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter can both resonate with this lyric: both of them have lost umpteen summers to the reality of being musicians, and both are still in the chase and still have dreams left to achieve, still remember the dulling ache of being young and chasing and fearing not keeping up with the elders who are ahead. “It’s been 38 summers, and I’m not in my bed, on the back of the bus on a bunk with the band.” Now they are the elders, the ones the younger singers and songwriters are keeping pace with, seeing the road begin to shorten, time running out. “Going so hard, now I miss my kids, overworked and overwhelmed.” It’s easy to forget that both Boggs and Beyoncé are human beings, especially when one is a longtime songwriting veteran with dozens of credits and one is the most revered people in black music — in music, period, which is why you make songs like this. Not everyone is free to sincerely indulge, but everyone is free to grieve the shortening of the runway, afraid of running and coming up short, losing time with your children, wondering whether the overwhelming grind will actually end. For Ms Knowles Carter, hopefully soon. For Mx Boggs, the future is far more uncertain.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Authenticity arguments are generally boring. But I would be lying if I claimed it didn’t lend some gravitas to “16 Carriages” that Beyoncé wrote it with a songwriter for Renaissance and not a songwriter for Fletcher. The song is a showcase of vocal interpretation — which it has to be, because it’s essentially one short melody — and genuinely strange, a power ballad that Beyoncé’s verses keep prodding and dodging until it sounds less inspirational than destabilized. More than anything she’s released in a while, this reminds me of 4, a sadly-but-unsurprisingly underrated casualty of the album it preceded.
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Ian Mathers: Much more so than “Texas Hold ‘Em,” this feels like one of the high-drama Lemonade or Beyoncé tracks transposed to a more country backing — not in a bad way, if anything in the “this is a real song because it works even if you do it real stripped down” sense. (Not that this is particularly stripped down; the bombast really works for me, actually.) The fit isn’t quite as smooth as “Texas Hold ‘Em,” but that just means that one feels like an all-timer while this just feels strong. I suspect it’ll work great on the album — sequencing being yet another thing Beyoncé is generally great at.
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Will Adams: The “country” designation for “16 Carriages” doesn’t really connect with me. Rather, the song stands as the ideal version of what Beyoncé was going for with the adult contemporary half of I Am… Sasha Fierce that ended up quite bland. With heaps more production value and maturity, she’s finally sold it.
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Isabel Cole: I thought it was the melody that I didn’t quite like, but then I couldn’t get it out of my head for a week, and found I didn’t mind it there. The plodding beat makes sense conceptually — evoking the drag of horses’ hooves, or perhaps the crack of a whip driving them on as they pull — but it’s a little grating. The way the arrangement veers between sparseness and bombast feels like the song can’t make up its mind about whether it’s a vulnerable confession or a statement of pride. And, again, that’s the point, I know; and, again, it just doesn’t land for me.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Bombast can in its own right become a virtue – if this were any smaller of a song I’d note the flaws in its construction more closely, spend more time trying to piece together where the core metaphor goes. In practice, “16 Carriages” leaves me with no time or resistance to consider such petty concerns; in every giant, resounding organ chord and wail of the steel guitar I am simply awed, bearing witness to Beyoncé at her most ideal form, a force of grace and power embodied.
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Michael Hong: Authenticity is wholly unimportant when it’s this well-acted. With every shaky line reading and teetering run, she evokes the rickety journey of a carriage, bumping through the clunk of the guitar. It doesn’t matter whether the lyrics are true to Beyoncé or any of the songwriters; you hear the lift when she looks upward. 
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Leah Isobel: I wonder whether the Renaissance project is about refraction – funneling Beyoncé’s mythmaking through different genre prisms, seeing what aspects of her art and her life story are emphasized in each new mode. “16 Carriages” suggests as much. The Act 1 material felt like she had time-warped back into her youth, its energy libidinous and present-focused, its references rooted in the various forms of dance-pop that carried the early stages of her mainstream crossover. (Like, there are two Beyoncé songs that sample Donna Summer: one off Dangerously in Love, and one off Renaissance. Seems like a purposeful choice!) Here, though, her mode is more reflective, more “adult.” The previous record’s shifts in tempo and syncopation could evoke the time-shifting qualities of a great dancefloor, the way that the past and present and future blur into meaninglessness, but “16 Carriages” delineates clearly between what has passed and what is to come. Its instrumentation is built on harsh, regimented blasts of instrumentation that corral her vocal into measured units: you can hear her pacing out exactly how much melody she can fit in between each beat. It’s like the ticking of a clock, or a step forward into the future. But it feels limited, somehow, by that regimentation. “For legacy/ If it’s the last thing I do/ You’ll remember me,” she sings on the bridge, as if it’s a self-evident value. Perhaps it’s a peek inside what it takes to be an unbelievably famous and successful superstar after nearly 30 years: you cannot ever let yourself run out of steps forward. There is only the body and the road, pushing forward. I just wonder what it might sound like if she stopped.
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