If This Album Were a Book: Beyonce's Cowboy Carter

The Gilded Reign: Songs from the Borderlands

Upland Studios' If This Album Were A Book

Genre:

Epic Historical Fiction × Neo-Western Drama × Intergenerational Myth

Plot Summary:

Set across the post-Reconstruction American South, The Gilded Reign follows Carter—an heir to a fractured Black dynasty exiled from the land her ancestors once ruled. Banished after a scandalous betrayal at a music conservatory built for “true Southern refinement,” she disappears into the Black prairies of Texas where she is reborn—not as debutante, but as outlaw, songcatcher, and sovereign of her own mythology.

Through a chorus of ancestors, folk heroines, and spectral interludes, Carter embarks on a holy reclamation: of her name, her voice, and the sounds stolen from her kin. Across juke joints, juke-towns, desert showdowns, protest rodeos, and blues-folk ceremonies, she builds her own nation—not one bound by blood, but by belonging.

And just when the new empire seems whole, a letter from her old life arrives. The final reckoning isn’t in the West—it’s back where the betrayal began.

Protagonist:

Carter Mae Delphine Augustine, known as “Cowboy Carter”

A woman born into a gilded cage of high society expectation and silent trauma. Musically gifted, fiercely intelligent, and iconoclastic, she transforms exile into epic. Think Celie (The Color Purple) meets Claudia from Interview with the Vampire meets Dusty Springfield and Angela Davis in fringe.

Her arc is not survival—it is symphonic sovereignty.

Character Personas:

Mama Reign – Carter’s grandmother and ancestral voice, sings lullabies in lullaby/hymnal form throughout the book

Zion – a blind guitarist who lost his sight in Selma and serves as Carter’s first mentor

Veda Rose – an Indigenous-Black cowgirl spiritualist who sees “sound as memory”

The Conservatory Madam – A veiled figure who represents legacy institutions that once silenced Carter, now unraveling

“The 8” – A collective of Black folk artists who rebel through music (a nod to Destiny’s Child / 8-count rhythm)

Visual Aesthetic:

• Sepia-drenched high contrast film stills

• Dusty blue and rust red palette

• Prairie lace and gilded fringe, veils over protest signs

• Bolo ties, wax-stamped letters, rusted revolvers over symphony sheets

• Beyoncé as cover muse, shot like a Toni Morrison heroine on horseback

• Visions styled by Kahlil Joseph and Melina Matsoukas

Narrative Flow:

• Part I: Exile (Quiet Powerlessness)

• Part II: Crossing (Spiritual Apprenticeship)

• Part III: Reckoning (Outlaw)

• Part IV: Reign (Self-Made Sovereignty)

How We'd Publish It (Upland Studios Vision):

The Editorial Object: A Book as Archive, Sound Relic, and Art Ritual

• Hardcover: Oversized 6.5” x 9.5”, linen-textured, with embossed gold thread typography

• Interior: Mixed-format storytelling (prose, voice memos, poetry, AI-channeled dreams, TikTok transcriptions, etc.)

• Designed inserts: Fold-out ancestral maps, printed vinyl overlays, tear-out lyric pages

• Each chapter opens with a sound portal: a QR code linked to a soundscape or holographic visual

The Listening Crate from Upland Studios includes:

• “The Gilded Reign” Rooibos tea blend (vanilla, calendula, cinnamon, pink salt)

• Aromatic Cowboy Carter cashmere soy candle

• Digital Playlist: “The Sound & The Story” Frequency 1

• Velvet pouch with Cater Mae coins: stamped metal tokens with ancestral affirmations

• A leather-bound The Gilded Reign Notes journal (Noor’s quotes + blank pages for reader’s voice

The Visual Companion: Upland Originals produces an NFT-gated, cinematic short film called:  “The Carter Myth” told through oral storytelling, archival reenactments, and dreamscape animation

• Shot in the aesthetic of Beyoncé’s Lemonade x A24's The Green Knight

• Directed by a Black woman filmmaker, featuring dance, silence, and sound as narrative

• Visuals include: Dusty chapels, ancestral fire circles, silent disco battles, healing rituals in laundromats, rooftop harmony scenes at dusk

• Premiered as part of an immersive Upland gallery + pop-up tour

• Each reader can mint a Frequency Key that unlocks access to exclusive:

  • Deleted scenes and extended character monologues

  • Soundtrack breakdowns + remix stems

  • Voting rights to greenlight the next Wildflower origin story

  • “Build Your Wildflower” AI-powered writing tool: readers create their own heroine

Live salon-style launch events at art houses, music venues, or tea lounges in LA, ATL, Houston, and London.

Targeted placements: ESSENCE, CRWN Magazine, The Creative Independent, Paper Mag

Partner with Beyoncé fan pages, Afrofuturist Book Clubs, Black girls in film & tech collectives

Who We Imagine Reading It:

• Black & Brown Gen Z and Millennial women who love Afrofuturism, cinematic fantasy, spirituality, and cultural reclamation.

• Young creatives hungry to see their multiplicity reflected—musical, literary, rebellious

• Beyoncé fans drawn to legacy, lineage, and storytelling through non-linear form

• Readers of Jesmyn Ward, Toni Morrison, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Eve L. Ewing

• Artists who feel exiled from “traditional” spaces but born to build their own

• Creators and writers looking to see themselves in modern myth and futurism

Quote from the Preface (if Beyonce wrote it): “ I wasn’t born to raise my voice. I was born to raise the frequency—to tune chaos into harmony, to hum the forgotten names of women who came before, to bend sound like scripture, and remind the world that healing isn’t quiet… it’s precise.”