John Foster played a sold-out show at The Texas Club in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the weekend, and shared footage of his pre-show hangs with his band before they took the stage. As the American Idol runner-up noted in his caption, he wasn’t wearing his signature cowboy hat in the behind-the-scenes clip.

“Here’s a rare glimpse of me without a hat on—I think we’re all close enough now that y’all are allowed to see that!” Foster captioned the post. “This is a clip of some jamming the band and I did before our sold-out show at @thetexasclub. ‘Sing all night long’ is exactly what we did, and we had an absolute blast. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Foster always wears a cowboy hat when he’s performing. “My hat stays on always,” he previously told The Advocate. “I don’t usually wear it very much outside of the stage, but when I’m on stage, I’ve had that hat on for … gonna be three years in July. [For] every single performance and for virtually every single performance, I’ve had that hat on since my very first gig. So there’s no way I can go on that stage without it.”

Amid his American Idol journey earlier this year, Foster took to TikTok to explain why his hat is so special to him. He got the cowboy hat at an antique shop in Gruene, Texas, after “[hitting his] head on something that was hanging.”

As Foster explained, “I pulled it down and it was this old cowboy hat. Traditional cowboy hats never really look good on me, like, things like this. It was in my mind that maybe I needed to wear a cowboy hat because I was getting into country music seriously. A lot of my favorites wore cowboy hats, [like] George Strait, Alan Jackson, but it never really looked good on me.”

He decided to try this one on just to see, and “lo-and-behold, I put it on, and it fit,” he shared, adding, “I was like, ‘Well, this must be a sign to get this.’ I started wearing it at shows and gigs and it looks beat up and stuff because it’s played many a gig.”