Saddle up for two weeks of Cowboy Carter! Over the next ten weekdays, I’ll count down my favorite tracks from Beyoncé’s latest opus, the second act of a planned trilogy.

While Act I, 2022’s Renaissance, explored 1970’s Black disco and house music, this chapter has been marketed as the pop star’s “country” album. It is that, to a degree, but it’s a lot of other things as well. Cowboy Carter finds Beyoncé at her most adventurous and playful when it comes to exploring different genres.

I won’t begin to try to dissect every reference or footnote present on this dense, imaginative album. I’ll save that for Wikipedia and Genius.com. Instead, I’ll focus on what I like about the actual songs.

I’ll say up front that I love this album, start to finish. I might have an order of song preference, but Cowboy Carter has no skips. This is my favorite Beyoncé album since 2016’s Lemonade, and her fourth in a row that takes to heart the concept of an album as more than just a collection of songs.

She has notoriously been snubbed by the Grammys in the Album of the Year category, an oversight that stings all the more when you consider how creatively she has stretched the boundaries of what an album can be in the modern pop music landscape. Maybe Cowboy Carter, which embraces genres and sounds that are typically catnip for the Grammys, will finally earn her the prize.

Note: Cowboy Carter is a lot of album, boasting 27 tracks. I will not be including the spoken-word interludes (sorry, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Linda Martell) or the excerpt of Chuck Berry’s ‘Oh Louisiana’ with sped-up vocals. That still leaves 22 songs to rank, so let’s get to it…

#22. ‘Spaghetii’

Kicking off with a quote from Black country trailblazer Linda Martell about how genres can be confining, this is the album’s first foray into rap after a first half that leans into country and folk.

#21. ‘Protector’

I always react negatively when an artist’s kid makes a cameo appearance on a song. No offense to Rumi Carter, whose request for a lullaby is adorable but unnecessary. Nice enough song, otherwise.

#20. ‘Amen’

The album’s final track wraps things up in elegant fashion, and echoes the opener in a way that invites an immediate replay. It feels more like a coda than a proper song, which hurts it in the rankings.