Cowboy Carter was released to critical acclaim on Friday, with reviews calling it a “masterpiece” and a “slick and starry Western epic”.
But some of the best-received songs, including Ya Ya and Spaghetti, are reportedly not present on the vinyl edition.
The songs and interludes reported missing are: Spaghetti, Flamenco, The Linda Martell Show, Ya Ya and Oh Louisiana.
It is not clear whether all vinyl copies are affected. Fans have also reported that CD copies are missing four tracks.
The likely explanation is that Beyoncé added these songs late into the album’s creation.
Vinyl pressing plants are booked months in advance, with lead times of 10 weeks to six months – meaning albums have to be submitted long in advance of their release.
But it also not unusual for artists to tweak track lists and arrangements at the last minute.
Famously, Kanye West updated his 2016 album The Life Of Pablo several times after it was released, with songs updating on streaming services for weeks before he was finally satisfied.
Beyoncé also modified her previous album, Renaissance, in the week after its release, by changing a lyric to remove a slur commonly used to demean people with cerebral palsy.
On Friday, the star said Cowboy Carter had taken “over five years” to create.
Instead, she released the more dance-centric Renaissance as a response to the Covid-19 lockdown.
The suggestion that Cowboy Carter had been waiting in the wings for several years caused confusion, with fans demanding to know why their physical copies were incomplete.
Meanwhile, other fans have speculated that the star changed her album’s title late in the day.
Instead of Cowboy Carter, the spine of the CD and vinyl copies is labelled “Act ii: Beyincé”.
Sleuths in the Beyhive subsequently discovered that this is a reference to the star’s ancestral surname: Her maternal grandparents were called Beyincé – but the spelling was changed on her mother Tina’s birth certificate.
Speaking to Heather Thompson’s In My Heart podcast in 2020, Tina said her mother, Angnéz Beyincé, had asked for the documents to be changed but was told, “Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate”.
The story feeds into Cowboy Carter’s narrative, which deals with the marginalization of black people in country music and the American South.
It skillfully blends the sounds of country and American folk with hip-hop, pop and glistening funk, deliberately dismantling the idea of racial divides across musical genres.
In her interview, Beyoncé added that the album’s organic sound was partially in response to the digital production techniques behind most modern pop albums – including her own.
