The 67th Grammy Awards were held at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Feb. 2. Despite the crowd of over 13,000 people present, many people were shocked when the winners were announced that night, including me. 

The biggest honor to come from the Grammy Awards is, of course, Album of the Year, which Taylor Swift won last year. This year, lots of people were expecting Billie Eilish’s album Hit Me Hard and Soft to win that title award. Unfortunately, it did not. However, Beyonce’s album Cowboy Carter did win the award, as well as Best Country Album.

I will admit that I was very upset at this announcement, and I still am. To be completely honest, I had only heard about half of the songs on Beyonce’s album, but I have since listened to the album in its entirety, and I think some of the music is good. I especially like the songs “16 Carriages,” “Mercy” and “BodyGuard” as they all have many different aspects and they are the most musically diverse songs on the album. However, Cowboy Carter had some major flaws that Billie Eilish’s album Hit Me Hard and Soft didn’t have. 

For starters, of the 27 tracks on Cowboy Carter, six are introducing the next song or are less than one minute long – and 12 are covers or collabs (including numbers from the previous statistic). Additionally, Billie Eilish wrote almost all the songs in Hit Me Hard and Soft, some being co-written with her brother, while most songs in Cowboy Carter were either co-written or not written by Beyonce at all. Another critique that I have about the album is that most of the songs, except for a few, sound very similar and all the themes are also very one note. 

But instead of focusing on all the negatives of Cowboy Carter, I find it beneficial to point out the positives of Hit Me Hard and Soft. To start, all of the songs are complex and emotional. While Beyonce’s album does use emotional appeal in her album in songs such as “Jolene” or “Blackbiird,” Billie’s album reaches a new level of emotion, targeting topics such as body image or love. Her music style also changes heavily throughout the album, starting emotionally with the song “Skinny,” which focuses on body image issues. It then goes into “Birds of a Feather,” a song that can be interpreted in many different ways, but is heavily focused on forming lifelong friendships.

Comparing this masterpiece of an album to Cowboy Carter is almost impossible to do because they are so vastly different. Where Hit Me Hard and Soft excels, Cowboy Carter falls short. Not only does it fall short in musical talent, it falls short in people’s choice as well. 

Cowboy Carter had about 1.6 billion streams, which is a sizable number. However, Hit Me Hard and Soft had 5.6 billion streams, almost five times more than Beyonce. Additionally, Cowboy Carter was at No. 1 on Vinyl Albums for seven weeks, while Hit Me Hard and Soft was at No. 1 for 27 weeks. Finally, according to kworb.net, Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is at #6 on spotify charts in the USA, while Cowboy Carter isn’t on the charts at all. 

With all this information, I firmly believe that Billie Eilish should have won this Grammy. Not only was her music significantly better, her statistics and overall career indicate that she would have been the best artist to win Album of the Year because of Hit Me Hard and Soft’s roaring success.