How Post Malone went country (Carefully, with a beer in his hand)

Post Malone emerged from a porta-potty on a recent Wednesday afternoon to meet his new Nashville public.

The face-tattooed pop chameleon had been cruising slowly across downtown, hidden on the back of an 18-wheeler that carried just a couple of speakers, some beers, two to-go toilets and a pair of superstars. As usual, Post — born Austin Post and known as one or the other, or the cuter variation, Posty — had brought a friend along as a local emissary.

So when the truck’s flatbed cover fell and the bathroom doors opened, revealing both him and the burly country hitmaker Luke Combs, everyone in sight — giddy children and grizzled grandfathers, wasted tourists and jaded locals — lost their minds as planned.

“Posty, we love you!” fans shouted from cars and skateboards amid a sea of raised cellphones. Professional cameras rolled, too, the herds thickening down Broadway as the truck eased past Nudie’s Honky Tonk, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen and the Whiskey River Saloon.

Like Nashville Pied Pipers, the once-unlikely duo were using the stunt to film a last-minute, lightly slapstick music video for Post’s new single featuring Combs, “Guy for That.”

But Post’s choice of company and his surprise appearance in the heart of town, working the crowd in a Dolly Parton Fan Club trucker hat and boots, also confirmed what most fans paying attention — and certainly most in Nashville — had already gathered: Post Malone, like much of pop music, was going country.

After years of shape-shifting and some focused flirting, Post will put out his new album, “F-1 Trillion,” on Aug. 16, two days after his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, a conquering capstone to his seamless embrace by the current country establishment.

The LP, featuring “Pour Me a Drink” and “Hide My Gun,” includes Nashville subject matter, storytelling, session players and stars — a cross-generational murderer’s row drawing from various country niches, including Parton, Morgan Wallen, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton, Brad Paisley, Chris Stapleton, Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll.

Amid tributes to the old-school classics and ‘90s power country, there’s outlaw storytelling with the next-generation bluegrass star Billy Strings and an album-closing daddy-daughter ballad, in which Post imagines his toddler’s future wedding.

And although Post’s pivot has been years in the making, stretching all the way back to his Texas roots, it couldn’t have landed at a better time: Having cooled commercially, with two disappointing albums that failed to connect following a string of historic early career successes, he will release “F-1 Trillion” just as country is cresting in the zeitgeist.

These days, after some delays going digital, acts like Wallen, Combs and Zach Bryan regularly out-stream rappers and pop singers, while No. 1 hits like “Texas Hold ‘Em” by Beyoncé and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey have cemented twang as the musical accent of the moment.

Already, it’s working for Post: “I Had Some Help,” his puckish single with Wallen, Nashville’s reigning bad-boy prince, has commanded the country charts on its way to becoming the most dominant single of the year so far, with six weeks atop the all-genre Billboard Hot 100.

Yet it would be a mistake to see Post’s latest evolution as merely an exercise in trend hopping instead of the most perfect example and execution of his career modus operandi: using his electric charisma and pliable, Auto-Tuned vibrato to make friends in high places; remaining nimble and mutable enough to blend right in; and pulling off some of the defining, boundary-blurring smashes of the streaming age.

“Genres suck,” Post, 29, said the week after his latest Nashville visit, in Los Angeles, where he would appear onstage with Dwight Yoakam. “It’s easier to catalog music that way. But at a certain point — and the cool thing is that it’s moving towards this — why can’t you mix all this together and make something that’s truly unique to you?”

It’s a kumbaya refrain he’s been echoing since not long after his first hip-hop-inflected single, “White Iverson” from 2015, when he tweeted, “i am not a rapper, im an artist. you can’t box me into a genre or anything i jus make what i want,” much to the chagrin of those already questioning why a white teenager with braids, gold teeth and chains was “saucin’,” “swaggin’” and “ballin’” his way to a major label deal.

In the decade since, Post has toned down some of his defensive petulance and outlasted fever-pitched cultural conversations about appropriation, adopting an all-purpose sweetheart’s humility while still inking up his entire face and swapping out his grills and million-dollar diamond fangs for permanent platinum.

“I’ve still got my chains,” he said over his ever-present cigarettes and beer, wearing designer Western wear with a lock of his daughter’s hair on a thin, unadorned necklace.

“I love my Maybach,” he added. “That’s still me. Everything was always me. I just don’t go spend all my money in the strip club, because I want to be in the woods.”

Along the way, Post became an avatar, if not the poster child, for the genre-bending future promised by file-sharing and Spotify playlists, always nodding to his background as the weirdo son of a former wedding DJ who introduced him to metal, funk and gangster rap. (He credits his mother and grandparents in Big Sandy, Tennessee, with his appreciation of outlaw country — and also his love of smoking inside.)

“I would go upstairs on the computer and make a beat and then put my headphones in and try to learn a Metallica riff and then I’d get the acoustic guitar and learn to play ‘Tear in My Beer,’” Post said of his early years dabbling in music. “I would write a Hank Williams or Johnny song, record that, sing over some 808s and record that song, and then I’d make an indie-rock song and record that, too.”

Once chronically sad and insecure, music and video games — he has famously credited “Guitar Hero” with encouraging his playing — earned him confidence and kinship across a broad spectrum. “I could hang out with the Magic the Gathering nerds,” he said, “and also hang with the football team.”

That good-vibes omnivorousness has made Post one of pop’s premier, in-demand collaborators. But while his earlier music tended toward melodic rap production and vernacular — like the slurry disaffection of “Rockstar” with 21 Savage, which went diamond (or 10-times platinum) or the shinier “Sunflower” with Swae Lee (the first song to ever go double-diamond) — he has gradually relaxed his hardened pose. Only more doors have opened.

This year alone, Post has appeared on Beyoncé's “Levii’s Jeans,” from her own country-inspired foray, “Cowboy Carter,” and Taylor Swift’s “Fortnight,” a synth-pop chart-topper. His career list also includes Young Thug, the Weeknd, Doja Cat, Ozzy Osbourne, Lorde, Justin Bieber, YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Fleet Foxes.

Post cites his lack of ego and pretentiousness — along with, self-deprecatingly, his mastery of Auto-Tune — as his selling point in the studio. He is also just good company — winning and solicitous, a man of superlatives and honorifics, a smiley people-pleaser unleashing a constant stream of sirs, ma’ams and genuine-seeming praise.

“I just want to hang out, have a beer, listen to your ideas,” he said. “I feel like there’s a lot of people set in their ways. I just want to make the song work in the best way for the song.”

It makes sense, then, that “F-1 Trillion” is essentially a duets record, with stacked liner notes that include Nashville’s most musically progressive, decorated writers — Ashley Gorley, Ernest, Hardy — and also classic session players, including brothers Paul and Larry Franklin, who added pedal steel and fiddle to an album filled with live instrumentation and a pointed absence of 808s and trap drums.

“He’s not playing dress-up here,” said guitarist Derek Wells, who has performed on more than 100 country No. 1s and recalled cutting a tone-setting Western swing number in his band’s first overnight session with Post Malone. “No one cuts Western swing songs for streaming numbers.”

Post’s official introduction to the Nashville studio machine came last year via the producer known as Charlie Handsome, who went from making tracks with Drake, Travis Scott and Young Thug to becoming a key architect of Wallen’s rap-indebted, modern country sound.

Following Post’s tentative moves deeper into pop and rock on “Twelve Carat Toothache,” in 2022, and last year’s “Austin” — his first albums that have not yet been certified platinum — he considered the idea that he had lost his sheen as a hitmaker.

“There was a second there where I was like, ‘Oh well, maybe I have made enough money, and it’s time to go and just ranch,’” he said.

But reconnecting over the pandemic with Handsome — an early collaborator who produced the acoustic-driven “Go Flex” on Post’s first album, “Stoney” — was like a portal to new possibilities.

Handsome, who produced every song on “F-1 Trillion” with Louis Bell, Post’s musical right hand and the wizard behind his unmistakable vocal tone, said he had predicted this path when he first met Post a decade ago as an unsigned artist.

“I used to say to people, he’s a reverse Taylor Swift: He’s going to start as a rapper, become a huge pop star and after all that, he’s going to be a country artist,” Handsome said, predicting accurately then that it would happen on Post’s sixth album, typically the last in a major label record deal.

“He knows every country song,” Handsome said. “You can pick a random Hank Williams Sr. song from 1954 and he’s going to know all the lyrics for some reason.”

Post’s most effective vehicle for communicating musical reverence throughout his career has been the cover song, from surprisingly faithful renditions of Bob Dylan and Nirvana to a foreshadowing performance of numbers by Paisley and Sturgill Simpson in 2021.

Ernest, who called Post “a true steward of music,” remembered a session with Post and McGraw when they “passed the guitar around, just singing Haggard songs back and forth” to break the ice. “We spent as much time as listening to country music as we did making it,” he added.

Crucially, like Post, both Handsome and Ernest, who became the album’s core engine, are also millennials raised in the South on as much rap as country. Never as far apart as imagined by purists, both genres have long represented both a real lifestyle and an exaggerated one, with constant tugs of war over realness and who or what doesn’t belong.

But whereas the rap world came to value porousness, with innovation winning out over exclusivity, country had been stingier — especially in its old systems, like radio and the Nashville studio circuit — until recently. Decades of chipping away at dogmas — Nelly’s forays with McGraw and Florida Georgia Line; Sam Hunt; Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” — allowed Wallen and his cohort its current period of open-eared dominance.

Still, like white rappers Kid Rock and Jelly Roll before him, Post saw an opening — and a welcome reception — in moving the other direction.

He theorized that the pace and over-digitalization of modern life made people crave “simpler lifestyles” and “more guitar.” “I think they miss, you know, some authenticity,” Post said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.