Stella Lefty’s pop-country fusion hit “Boston” has become one of the biggest songs of the summer, joining tracks by Ella Langley, Morgan Wallen and Taylor Swift in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100. The song has also reached the top five on Hot Country Songs, where female artists recently controlled every position in the top five for a seven-week stretch.
That surge for “Boston” has also landed the song’s producer and co-writer, Joe Reeves, at No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Producers chart.
“I think it’s incredible how well women are doing in country right now,” Reeves tells Billboard. “I’m very grateful to be working with two talented women like Stella and [“Boston” co-writer] Grace [Enger], and all the female co-writers who I’ve been introduced to through this. And I love the way they are all bringing each other up. You see the community there and it feels strong.”
Reeves met Lefty in 2025, as he was looking for a new musical project to work on.
“She was doing kind of alternative music at the time, but that really caught my ear. I was like, ‘Damn, this girl’s got a really good voice.’ So me, her and Laura Veltz wrote this kind of dark indie-pop song [“The Kill”], which ended up being in Scream 7, which is so random. LIke the next day, her publisher texted me saying it was being synched.”
An early January 2026 session in Nashville would help spark “Boston,” which also interpolates Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season.” Reeves ended up producing the song, and also co-writing it with Lefty, Enger and Jacob “J-Kash” Hindlin.
“We were just coming up with little starts and different hooks. Then Stella started playing the chorus of ‘Boston,’ and both me and Grace were like, ‘There is definitely something to this,’” Reeves recalls. “We didn’t finish it that day and she kept posting [snippets of] the song on TikTok and then one day she was like, ‘We need to finish this.’ So she came to my studio in L.A.– it’s just this tiny, crammed space where I had squeezed a piano in the corner. I was thinking about selling that piano because I didn’t have the space, and luckily I didn’t, because it’s the one that ended up not only on ‘Boston,’ but also on the cover art.
“That first verse came together so quickly,” he continues. “Obviously, Stella loves country music and she was like, ‘I want that kind of “put you in the world” storytelling. A lot of the writing process for us is so easy in terms of just vibe in the room. We don’t ever want there to be pressure.”
Lefty’s commitment to producing an intimate, personal sound extended to the mic she used on “Boston.” “She loves this particular microphone, an SM7B and all the writers just use it in the room,” he explains. “I was like, ‘This isn’t the final vocal mic — I’ve got this expensive vocal mic that I invested in right here,’ and she was like, ‘No, I don’t want to use any of the fancy outboard gear. I just want to use this mic and sit on the couch and record it.’ And the song feels like she was just singing it on a couch rather than an expensive studio. Real credit to Stella – I feel like she is even more of a producer than she realizes. It’s just capturing lightning in a bottle and trying to give people an insight at that moment.”
Originally from South London, Reeves came to country after starting in rap, including writing, producing and/or playing on Ed Sheeran’s 2019 project The No. 6 Collaborations, the late Juice WRLD’s 2020 album Legends Never Die, British rapper Dave’s 2021 project We’re All Alone In This Together and Lil Durk’s 2022 album 7220.
“I think what I love most about being a producer is how many genres it’s just opened my eyes to,” he says. “I’m from South London and it’s a very multicultural place. We’ve got a lot of Afrobeat, a lot of U.K. rap, you’re listening to all sorts of music.”
His sessions on projects like Legends Never Die connected him with writer-musician-producer Charlie Handsome, who also started in rap before moving into country.
“Back before COVID, all the American rappers would come to London and would record while doing the festivals,” Reeves says. “So I was lucky enough to be working with Juice WRLD during those sessions in London. Unbeknownst to me, who was drumming on the sessions was Charlie Handsome. We’d worked on many songs together and didn’t know each other because we were split by where we were, location-wise.”
Handsome saw Reeves’ name on the credits and reached out for them to begin working together directly. One of the first songs they worked on together was Lil Durk’s 2021 collaboration with Morgan Wallen, “Broadway Girls.” The song topped Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in 2022.
“Back when I was sending Charlie loops and starts, that’s what I used to do as a producer, I was sending him stuff with the idea of it being cut by a rapper, with the idea of someone like Juice or Young Thug, whoever he was working with at the time. So when he told me a country artist had cut [‘Broadway Girls’,] I was confused,” he says. “But when I heard it, it sounded so effortless. He felt just as at home on that beat as any other rapper. It changed my view on what a genre could be–and that’s a credit to Charlie, too. I think he’s a very forward-thinking producer who doesn’t play by the rules.”
Reeves traveled to Los Angeles to continue working with Handsome and eventually moved to there in April 2024. Quickly, he began traveling to Nashville to collaborate more deeply with Nashville’s music community.
“I met all the Big Loud Records guys and it’s just a different world. The way [Nashville] writers churn out songs and come up with lyrics that I assumed would take months to write in a three-hour session, my mind was blown.”
Reeves has also worked on country projects like Jelly Roll’s Billboard 200 chart-topper Beautifully Broken and Thomas Rhett’s About A Woman, as well as Post Malone’s country-inspired album F-1 Trillion, contributing to songs including the Jelly Roll collab “Losers” and the Brad Paisley duet “Goes Without Saying.”
“I fell in love with country,” Reeves says. “When we were working on the Post album, Charlie sent me a bunch of references, a lot of ‘90s country and earlier stuff, loads of Keith Whitley.”
Of working with Jelly Roll, Reeves says, “He’s the most charismatic, lovely guy there is. It was the first time I was meeting him and you instantly get a sense of who he is. You can tell from his music, but that authenticity came through. We started writing and he really takes it in on a different level. And his voice, he was like, ‘Don’t be scared of starting [the song’s melody] higher than you think I can hit, because I can hit that,’ and he sings and it’s that voice. You’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh. That’s why you are you.’”
Reeves has dedicated the majority of this year to working with Lefty and the rest of her team on her full-length album, Long Way Home, due Aug 21.
“We’ve got so many amazing songs that I’m just personally just so proud of and can’t wait for everyone to hear,” Reeves says, adding of the album, “I would say it defies genre. There’s a lot of country elements and a lot of that is in the production. Me and her are both obsessed with pedal steel. In my studio, I’ve got mandolins [and] banjos. It’s very country-influenced. We don’t often use live drums, but we program them like a pop producer would. I don’t think we often shoot for concept-driven songs like Nashville tends to do, but I think that is one thing that maybe sets it apart from being purely country.”
Reeves believes the creative impulse among country music’s writers and artists to continually experiment and push the boundaries sets the genre apart and contributes to its current, expansive chart dominance and global rise. “I think Nashville is one of the most open-arms community right now, in terms of sonics,” he says. “I feel like everyone I’ve met, they are always trying to push something new.”
