Listen to “Cowboys Cry Too” by Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan

Grab your bandana and dry your eyes. A month and a half after Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan sang duets on “Stick Season” and “Mountain With a View” at the ACMs, they’ve teamed up again for a thoughtful new song: “Cowboys Cry Too.”

At a leisurely pace, Ballerini sings about her husband being “as stubborn as a weed in the garden” because he had a hard time growing up, while Kahan sings about how you can’t take away pain. “When he shows his skin and lets me in, that’s when he’s the hardest on me,” the chorus goes. “I didn’t know cowboys cried too.” The couple recorded the vulnerable track with producer and songwriter Alysa Vanderheym.

“In our world and culture and our echo chamber of highs and beautiful things, sometimes real feelings start to feel like something you just push aside or repress in order to keep up,” Ballerini said in a statement. “Especially the way so many men grow up, that kind of ‘saddle up, shake it off’ toxic masculinity mentality. I wanted to write down my perspective and essentially celebrate the vulnerable men in my life and Noah’s really unfiltered perspective just brought it to life in a more meaningful and beautiful way.”

Kahan added, “It’s the writers who are willing to go to the uncomfortable places that inspire me. Kelsea is one of them, and I knew if we could find something that we both believed in, it would expand our perspective on how we live, what society decides and what we should reject. ‘Cowboys Cry Too’ is everything I hoped our collaboration would be.”

Ballerini previously discussed the song with Taste of Country Nights“I wrote the chorus on my porch last November,” she said. “And I love the idea of ​​writing the song from a female perspective and dealing with toxic masculinity. Then when I was making the whole record and putting the puzzle together, I thought, ‘Man, if we had a male perspective on this that was willing to get into it and was really emotionally available to bring their perspective to the song, that would be great.'”

Ballerini contacted Kahan by sending him a direct message, according to Taste of the country. Kahan wrote his part while on tour and they recorded it before teaming up at the ACMs. “He opens his mouth and sings this whole verse and I was just like, ‘Oh my God,'” Ballerini said of her appreciation for Kahan. She added of his lyrics, “If you don’t deal with the things that live inside of you and your emotions and your traumas and your past and whatever it is, it somehow manifests itself in your life.”