During his ongoing US tour, Uncle Kracker joined a new interview with Songfacts, in which he touched upon his collaborations with Kid Rock. When asked about the 1999 song ‘Cowboy,’ he revealed:
“I hated that song! I begged him not to put that on. ‘Man, why are we doing this song?'”
To explain the reason, the singer said:
“We’d get in the studio, and he’d have an idea, and it was his thing. Anytime you write with him, it’s his. But I remember doing ‘Cowboy,’ and I don’t know why; I thought it was such a novelty thing.”
But his feelings for the track changed over time:
“It grew on me, and it meant more than the novelty by the time it was finished. He had a good way of massaging things to make them cooler than they started out. Another song that changed my life again. So, I love it now, but I hated it back then.”
Kid Rock launched ‘Cowboy’ as the fourth single from his 1998 album ‘Devil Without a Cause.’ It followed the release of another song, ‘Bawitdaba,’ which Uncle Kracker also talked about during the recent chat by saying:
“I always loved that from day one. I think that was the song that broke him. A great one.”
He shared the track’s backstory and went on:
“I remember he came up with that chorus – we were in the studio – and then it was just about doing verses and arrangements at that point. But he just hit that ‘Bawitdaba,’ which was really an old-school rap thing from the Sugarhill Gang. He made it into this hard, headbanging thing. It was so cool to us in the studio.”
Mentioning their approach to song-making back then, the singer added:
“There weren’t very many rules for us at all because, coming up as rappers, we’d been sampling and doing that stuff for years. The aftermath for the lawyers to figure that stuff out was probably a shitshow, but for us, we were just writing and making what felt good to us at the time. Nothing mattered other than feeling good.”
You can read Uncle Kracker’s full interview here.