On the title track of his upcoming album Banks of the Trinity, Texan and two-time Billboard Country Airplay chart-topper Cody Johnson is setting the record straight.
“There’s this common misconception that ‘Cody grew up working on a ranch and had horses and cows,’ and that was not the case,” says Johnson, who grew up in Sebastopol, Texas on the banks of the Trinity River. “My Dad and Mom worked very hard for the things we had, but we were not rich by any means. A lot of times, to make things stretch out a bit more, we would go down to the Trinity River, cast a net, run jug lines and go catfishing. When the white bass were running, we’d get pulled out of school to go catch as many white bass as we could to keep meat in the freezer. The first bar I snuck out to go play when I was 15 was on the banks of the Trinity River.”
So when Johnson heard “Banks of the Trinity,” written by Rodney Clawson, Chris Tompkins and Josh Kear, he says, “It started a slideshow of memories in my mind. I thought, ‘Let’s do something a little different, and tell people more about myself that they don’t know.”
Banks of the Trinity, will come out June 26 on COJO Music/Warner Records Nashville.
The project follows Johnson’s RIAA Gold-certified 2023 album Leather (and its Deluxe counterpart), which featured hits including “Dirt Cheap” and “The Fall,” and was named the album of the year at the 2024 CMA Awards. Johnson says he was already pulling together songs for this new project while Leather was still hitting its stride.
“The day we won album of the year, I said, ‘Okay, it’s time to get back to work,’” Johnson says. “We originally planned on trying to release it last year, but when I busted my eardrum and had to take three months off, that’s when I got some of the best songs on the album.”
On the new album, “Thank Somebody Country” pays homage to working-class and rural jobs that help keep the economy running, while the soulful “Time Bomb” looks with gratitude at the ups and downs that come with a skyrocketing career. Johnson also calls the quirky, post-breakup track “Horseback” one of his favorites. Meanwhile, the powerful ballad “I Have” will resonate with listeners who are weathering their own emotional and/or spiritual struggles.
“I’ve looked in the mirror before and thought, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ I’ve had instances where I turned to the bottle just to get by,” Johnson says. “Maybe them hearing an artist admit this stuff, maybe it will help them on their journey, like, ‘Man, it’s okay. Everybody’s been there.’”
For Johnson, 20 years spent building an award-winning, chart-topping and stadium-headlining career from scratch has meant overcoming fresh challenges that come with every new level of success.
“When it was me and the guys in a truck and trailer, it was a crazy party. Then you get a van and you’re traveling all over the country, kind of just a vagabond, sleeping in a van, and no money, it wore me down to the point where I really thought I wanted to quit,” he recalls. “I had to dig deep and say, ‘How bad do you want it?’ In 2017, everything started to take off and then it was dealing with a different beast, parts of fame nobody told me about, because I’ve never in my life said, ‘I want to get rich and famous.’ I just wanted to play music. But dealing with fame, it changes the vernacular of a lot of relationships, how people treat you. There will be people who are no longer friends, now they’re fans. A lot of personal relationships changed for me, and it was tough.”
For Johnson, among the relationships that changed were his relationship with his wife, Brandi, as well as with God. “It was really giving it over to God. It helped me find peace,” he says. “And my wife and I, two years ago, we went to marriage counseling and really tried to dig into our marriage, and that gave me peace. We’re so freakin’ happy now. I focused on my health, working out, a strict diet, taking the right peptides, just trying to be the best version of me that I can.”
On his new album, Johnson’s relationships with his fellow country artists played a key role on a couple of tracks. He teams with Brothers Osborne on “Fool Proof,” while Luke Combs joins him on “Shoot the Bull.”
“I could just hear that funky groove. It just screamed Brothers Osborne,” Johnson says of “Fool Proof.” “There’s not a Brothers Osborne song out there that I don’t like. I’m a huge fan, and they’re both really great guys, and I wanted them on it. So I told my band in the studio, ‘Listen, I don’t know if they’re going to be on it or not, but I really want to make this Brothers Osborne-esque.’ And then we finally heard back that they had time to do it. It was the icing on the cake for that tune.”
Johnson says “Shoot the Bull” writers Josh Phillips, Drew Parker, Casey Brown and Ray Fulcher “really took a chance,” as the song’s lyrics are tailored specifically around Johnson and Combs. “If you take that chance and an artist is like, ‘I’m not really comfortable with the representation of myself in this song’ or whatever, there goes your song, because you can’t really pitch it to another artist. But Luke was like, ‘There’s no way we can’t do this song.’ So, it was a done deal. [Lines about] tattooed knuckles, gold plated buckles and me talking about this wild card band selling out every seat, it literally sounds like me and Luke sitting in a bar, just shooting the bull.”
Johnson says when he and Combs do get time to talk, they are usually chatting about anything but music. “Half the time, whenever I call him, it’s about a watch I’m looking at, because he’s such a huge watch guy. In Nashville, after I won [the CMA Award for] male vocalist of the year, I was like, ‘Hey, I want to buy a watch to commemorate this moment and I don’t know anybody up here.’ He hooked me up with some people and went for a private viewing, they closed up the store and it was cool. He has much more expensive taste than I do, I will say that.”
Johnson is known for recording songs by other writers. But the new album’s final track, a steely-eyed cowboy story song, “Yippy Ty Oh Hey Hey,” is a rare solo write for him.
“That recording is what I recorded in my tack room and my barn, on my phone,” Johnson says. “We were trying to work cattle and it rained us out. I was in the barn and had my grandpa’s 1943 J45 [guitar]. I wrote that first verse and later wrote the second verse and recorded it on my phone. It’s just a cowboy story that has no agenda. And I wrote it by myself. And so it’s probably one of the most proud things I’ve ever written. And I think if I was going to write one 100%, it needed to be that one because it’s so off the beaten path for me.”
Cody Johnson, “Banks of the Trinity”Like the title track, the album’s cover also pays homage to Johnson’s childhood, and marks a departure from his previous sets. Johnson is nowhere to be found on the cover, which instead features a photo of an old grocery store, Lawrence Grocery, that used to be in Johnson’s hometown. That store was the place Johnson remembers riding his bike two miles down a dirt road to visit, a place where he would listen to adults talk about the weather and the cattle market.
“The man that owned the store, Hootie Lawrence — his name was Harold, but everybody called him Hootie — I wound up working two summers for him, working cows and baling hay,” Johnson recalls. “He taught me a lot about just being a good human being. It gives me a chance to honor what I learned there. The cover is different from anything I’ve ever done. It looks like an old Polaroid taped to the album. His son had a photo [of the store]. We had it digitized, and color corrected to match the rest of the artwork. We went out and did a photo shoot on the river and literally just went fishing for a day.”
His announcement of Banks of the Trinity follows recent news that Johnson is nominated for entertainer of the year, male artist of the year and single of the year (“The Fall”) for May 17’s ACM Awards. Earlier this year, Johnson broke a Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo record, bringing in 80,203 attendees for his March 22 performance, surpassing a record previously set by Country Music Hall of Famer George Strait.
After he releases Banks of the Trinity, Johnson also has more music in the pipeline, teasing that he has special collection of songs that he’s still looking for the right time to release.
“They tell the story of this couple meeting, falling in love and breaking up. I decided not to put them on this project because there is a certain female artist that I’m not going to name, that has agreed to write the fourth song to tell their story. It’s just kind of a side project, just a four-song story project.”
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