Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan Bring the Emotion with Country Ballad ‘Cowboys Cry Too’ at the 2024 CMA Awards

Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan are slowing things down.

The country singer and the “Stick Season” performer took the stage at the 2024 CMA Awards on Wednesday, Nov. 20 to perform their emotional duet “Cowboys Cry Too.”

With coordinating white outfits and smoke drifting across the stage floor, Ballerini, 31, and Kahan, 27, brought the waterworks during their performance.

“Cowboys cry too/They may not let ’em fall down in their hometown/Thinking they still got s— to prove/That well runs deep,” Ballerini sings in the chorus. “But when he’s showing his skin, letting me in/That’s when he’s toughest to me/I never knew/Cowboys cry too.”

Ballerini dropped the country ballad on June 28. In an interview on the Wayne D Show at the time, she revealed that she met Kahan at the 2024 Grammy Awards in February, and he asked her about her 2015 hit “Peter Pan.”

Then, when she was working on the song, she thought of Kahan because it honored “the men in my life that are emotional” and she knew he’d be “so down to go there.”

“He wrote his verse, and it just made the song a million times better,” she said.

Check out all of PEOPLE’s full CMA Awards coverage here.

In May, the pair joined forces for a medley performance of “Mountain with a View” and Kahan’s breakout hit “Stick Season” at the Academy of Country Music Awards.

“Cowboys Cry Too” served as the lead single for Ballerini’s new album Patterns. In October, she opened up to PEOPLE about the album’s inspiration.

“I think this thing happens when you turn 30 where you kind of assess your life,” Ballerini said. “And I came up for air and I was like, ‘Okay, all right, let’s take a little inventory here. What in my life right now do I love? What feels uncomfortable? What have I contributed to both of those things? What are my patterns? And then what do I want to work on and edit on myself? And then in my closest, most interpersonal relationships, what do I want to edit and challenge and celebrate also?’”

She added, “That’s, really, thematically the whole record. It’s just a deep dive in the self-assessment of entering my thirties.”

The 58th Annual CMA Awards broadcast live from Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on Wednesday, Nov. 20 from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on ABC. The show streams the following day on Hulu.