Heard of the Masters? You know—that aggressively-saturated patch of green where men in pastel trousers hit a tiny ball so hard it needs its own flight tracker, all while wearing visors cute enough to qualify as emotional support animals? Yeah. That one.
Most of our “golf knowledge,” which is about as deep as a sand trap and just as chaotic when we fall into it, comes from the ever-trickstering Niall Horan. And now, country crooner Thomas Rhett’s brought him in for a collab called ‘Old Tricks’, originally recorded with his The Voice dad, Blake Shelton, for the deluxe edition of 2024’s About a Woman. Niall first heard the track during its recording stages while Rhett was working with one-half of The Show producers Julian Bunetta, and apparently, it lodged itself into his psyche like a tee stuck in turf.
Thomas Rhett says in a press release
“I was at the Masters this year and went to hang out with Niall and Noah Kahan, and out of nowhere Niall goes, ‘I’m so mad you didn’t ask me to sing on “Old Tricks.”’ I said, ‘Man, you were the last person I would’ve thought would even like this one!’ He kept texting me about it after and he knew all the words,” Thomas Rhett says. “With how fired up he was and his connection with Blake, it felt like a full-circle moment and turned into something really fun. I’m pumped it’s finally out there and hope y’all love it as much as we loved making it.”
Where The Yeehaw Hits The Tee-Off
With a sly little lyric Niall insisted on slipping in (more on that soon), this collab doesn’t just sound like a boys-being-boys jam—it reads like a 19th-Hole Confession. In golf speak, that’s the confession you don’t make on the course… you make it to the bar afterward, whiskey in hand, plausible deniability left on the fairway.
So we’re leaning into the metaphor. Instead of a traditional review, we’re scoring ‘Old Tricks’ like a round of golf: front nine for performance, back nine for the barstool truth.
Now, if you’re not golf-coded, here’s your cheat sheet before we tee off:
- Par = doing exactly what’s expected (no worse, no better)
- Birdie = better than expected; a rare moment of honesty that actually lands
- Bogey = slip-up territory (the trick backfires)
- Double Bogey = yikes, he really thought that excuse still worked
- Eagle = a clean emotional strike—the truth actually hits the green
Because out on the course, Niall’s “old tricks” might look polished. But at the 19th hole? Well… that’s where the scorecard stops lying.
⛳ Front Nine — The Performance Round
The equivalent of touching the grass pre-game, checking the wind, smoothing your shirt collar, and making sure the turf is pretty enough for the promo shots—saddle up, because we are wheels-up on the fairway with launch sequence fully engaged and blasting off the tee box at full-send.
| Hole | Title | Score | Subtext |
| One | The Signature Niall Entrance | Par | Before we even tee off, we’re greeted by Classic Niall™—white shirt, guitar practically velcro’d to his ribcage, and that “aw shucks” grin that could sell sunshine to Arizona. He isn’t just excited about ‘Old Tricks,’ he’s practically auditioning to be its emotional support spokesperson. The energy is very “I found this song in the wild and decided to raise it like a rescue calf.” It’s textbook surface-level charm: polished, predictable, and exactly what you’d expect from pre-Barstool Niall. |
| Two | Country Costume Change | Birdie (for theatrics) | Nothing says commitment to the bit like the Irishman strutting onstage in Austin for The Show: Live on Tour dressed like he was born three yeehaws to the left of Nashville. Cowboy hat, boots, Guinness—the full starter kit. Fans didn’t melt from the Texas heat—they melted from the yeehaw soft launch. Then he double-downs by copy-pasting the look onto the single’s cover art. It’s cosplay, but professionally licensed. He’s not in the confession yet — he’s marketing his way toward it. Cute. Strategic. Still on the course. |
| Three | Tease the Tease | Par | In the age of soft launches and “accidental” leaks, nothing screams performance era like serving just enough of the verse to get everyone foaming at the timeline. TR drops a preview clip on his Instagram like a fisherman chumming the water—not the meal, just the scent. It’s a well-rehearsed move: create hype, manufacture longing, stand back as the comments combust. Everyone gets breadcrumbs, no admission. This is foreplay with a radio-safe runtime. Slick. Controlled. Entirely intentional. |
| Four | The Bro-Chat Scramble | Par | The boyband-to-bro band energy comes in hot with a DM three-way (the most heterosexual sentence ever written) video between TR, Blake, and Nialler—complete with wink-wink “look, dad, I replaced you” energy. It’s banter as branding: staged casualness, curated looseness, the PR version of throwing a football around so no one asks how you actually feel. Insert The Voice gif and cue the polite chuckle. Still fairway. Still mask-on. |
| Five | Truck Bed Harmony Hour | Bogey | Quick! Another video! This time with Noah Kahan and a suspiciously rustic production truck, like someone whispered, “make it look Americana so it feels authentic.” There’s a strategically placed beer bottle, a twilight glow, and the kind of ‘tipsy spontaneity’ that takes three cameras and a lighting rig to capture. Manufactured organic, with a side of yeehaw ambiance. Promo disguised as porch-jam. |
| Six | The Playlist Blessing | Par | The track drops. Spotify Hot Country and US iTunes Country Songs usher it onto the green like a friendly marshal waving you toward the fairway—it bumps up to #9, Niall’s first top 10 appearance in the category, not because anyone swung wild, but because the algorithm knows its manners. Nothing risky, nothing confessional: a clean placement. A very safe stroke. |
| Seven | Line Dancing = Free Marketing | Birdie (for efficiency, lol) | TikTok does what PR budgets dream of: instantaneous unpaid choreography. Fan Alice Eve posts her “golf swing line dance,” Niall taps a repost, and suddenly the internet is running 18 holes of free promo. It’s adorable, contagious, and still firmly surface-level—all sparkle, no subtext. This is where everyone’s tapping their boots, not their intuition. |
| Eight | Nostalgia as Glue | Bogey | Spotify’s visualizer tosses in a flashback reel of TR and Nialler doing ‘Slow Hands’ at C2C (Country to Country) Festival—the PR equivalent of a “see, this pairing has lore!” slideshow. A warm nod to history, a little soft-focus romance…but still very much performance-era Niall. Nice? Yes. Vulnerable? Absolutely not. |
| Nine | Soft-Launching The Genre Pivot | Birdie (but with an asterisk) | The subtext starts to hum here—casual listeners hear ‘country collab,’ but Niall fans hear a genre trial balloon. This hole is less promo stunt, more foreshadowing: NH4 is suddenly wearing metaphorical spurs. It’s still illusion-round energy, but the steering wheel is gently turning toward the bar. The cart is coasting… confession-ward. |
We’re now one drink away from stealing the golf cart and doing a yeehaw victory lap past the driving range while everyone’s tipping their cowboy hats and pretending not to notice we’ve veered wildly off-course.
🥃 Back Nine — The Barstool Confessional
Because once you’ve wandered off the fairway and into the rodeo bar, the smile stops being a decoration and starts sounding like a stall—it’s no longer two-step line dancing but cry-dancing under flickering neon, tracing every lyric with a blade of hay and the kind of honesty that only shows up after last call. Somewhere in that crossfade, the promo polish slips, and the song stops performing for us and starts confessing to itself.
| Hole | Title | Score | Subtext |
| 10 | The Spellcaster at the Board | Par → edging Birdie | Julian Bunetta’s production is the first place the mask slips—he doesn’t build beats; he builds truth-serums with choruses attached. With a résumé that spans ‘Espresso’ to ‘Night Changes,’ he’s basically the wizard of “oh this sounds fun until you notice you’re bleeding emotionally.” The more the track sparkles, the more it reveals its center of gravity: not swagger—vulnerability waiting for permission. The barstool is warming. |
| 11 | The First Crack in the Voice | Birdie | You think you know TR’s range until he lets out that first raw, angsty ramp-up—the one that sounds like the mic caught him remembering, not performing. It’s less “stage vocal” and more “confession said accidentally at 1:17 a.m.” It’s the moment you look up from your drink and realize, oh—this isn’t just a barn-stomper. Someone means this. |
| 12 | Bones and Barrelhouse | Bogey → borderline Double (the truth’s knocking…but they’re still pretending it’s just room service) | The instrumentation invites both crowds—the boot-scooting girlies and the bone-creaking uncles—but the fun is starting to rattle in its casing. The guitars don’t just sparkle now; they strain, like the song is holding its breath under a weight it can’t shimmy off anymore. This isn’t truth emerging—it’s the body betraying the performance first. |
| 13 | The Inflection That Gives It Away | Birdie | The last “old tricks” in the chorus is the sonic equivalent of eye contact held too long—pretty on paper, but personal in the delivery. Whether it’s a vocal crack or a studio autotune choice, that chanting, Thomas Rhett voice tilt is the first moment the rodeo energy turns human again. You don’t throw your head back and shout along because it’s catchy; you do it because it lands. |
| 14 | The ‘That’s-Not-About-Hangovers’ Verse | Double Bogey | “TR, you think that’s bad?” Niall grins—except, spiritually, he’s not talking about liquor recovery time. The parallel is too clean: worn-out bodies / worn-out excuses. Thomas is mourning Sundays; Niall is mourning spark. This is where the barstool squeaks—because this no longer sounds like country character voice. This sounds like someone’s real life leaking through the mic. |
| 15 | Intentional Song Selection Syndrome | Birdie | It becomes impossible to ignore that Niall could’ve hopped onto any Rhett track—there are jukeboxes’ worth of safer, flirtier, flashier choices—but he chose the verse about a love gone quietly numb. That’s not a coincidence—that’s proximity to truth. Musicians don’t “pick a song”—they reveal the one already haunting them. |
| 16 | The Lie That Won’t Fly Anymore | Eagle | The lyric swap—camping to golfing (“All the things I used to do, I can’t get away with / Like sayin’ golfin’ with the boys is a business trip”)—is played like a joke, but it reads like a tell. It’s not just a bad cover story; it’s him choosing distance disguised as downtime. The “boys weekend” excuse only works until someone stops believing it—and here, his partner already has. The charm’s calcified. The curtain’s down, the alibi’s tired, and the loneliness is echoing louder than the laughter. This is the quiet part of the rodeo bar, where the performance ends and the truth orders another drink. No one’s laughing now—they’re just listening. |
| 17 | Riff-as-Deflection | Par Save (a charming little cover-up swing) | The post-chorus guitar riff is delicious—swaggering, stompy, generous—but it’s also a dodge. A musical “look over here” so we don’t stare too long at the lyrical admission in the verses before it. It’s charming, but also transparent: they’d rather rip a solo than sit in silence with what they just said. |
| 18 | The Truth Slips Through the Twang | Birdie (barreling toward confession) | On paper, this is just a “we’re getting older” song—but that final, combined chorus hits like a mirror being turned around. “The cold, hard truth is getting harder to swallow” isn’t nostalgia; it’s self-recognition. The delivery’s too clean to be casual—that’s a man circling the thing he can’t quite admit yet. You can hear the resistance collapse mid-line, like his voice finally realizes what his mouth’s been avoiding. The trick doesn’t land anymore because the trick was never for us. It was for him—and he just ran out of the room to hide behind the hook. |
🍻🏌️ Hole 19 — The Final Score
Now it’s less about how clean the swing is and more about what gets admitted when the boots come off and the barstool starts telling the truth. Until the rodeo mask finally slips, we’ll be over here two-stepping like it’s nobody’s business. Got your own line-dance confession brewing? Drop it on our socials—Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook—before their ‘Old Tricks’ officially expire and the 19th hole does what it always does best: reveals the score that was hiding under the swing.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT NIALL HORAN:
DISCORD | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TIKTOK | TWITTER | YOUTUBE | WEBSITE
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THOMAS RHETT:
FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TWITTER | WEBSITE | YOUTUBE
