Cody Jinks is coming off one of the most impressive album releases I’ve seen in a long time, as he dropped country album Mercy, as well as a metal rock album None The Wiser at the exact same time.
And both are FIRE.
With this new country album though, he’s even garnered a bit more mainstream publicity, with his new song “Like A Hurricane” featured on a small number of mainstream country radio stations.
I’d say it’s about damn time.
Recently, he sat down with Kelleigh Bannen from Apple Music’s “Today’s Country Radio” podcast to discuss what it was like working on both albums, as well as the “shut up and sing” crowd.
Regarding the versatility of Mercy, and how it ranges from slow-paced Randy Travis style songs, to boot stompers like “How It Works” and “Like a Hurricane:”
“There was such a separation of the types of songs, because take the title track, ‘Mercy,’ which is this very, very understated, beautiful love song. Very in the vein of mid-80s Randy Travis, not a lot going on.
And then there’s a couple other songs on there like that as well, but then you have the ones like ‘How It Works’ and ‘Hurricane.’ And we did change it up a little bit this time, we put some more rocking stuff on there.
But at the end of the day, I was a bar band getting started and we’re really just a honkytonk band because it’s elements of country, which, it’s predominantly that, but there’s elements of blues and there’s elements of rock and roll.”
He also weighed in on the “shut up and sing” crowd, the trolls that only want to hear what you’re saying as long as it’s in the music:
“The thing about songwriting is that people want to hear what you have to say as long as it’s to music. Whenever people start going ‘well, you punched your ticket, or you got what you wanted, you asked for this’ and all this kinda stuff… you can’t say anything about it, you have to be above reproach at all times.
Because if you fire back and say ‘hey I was just speaking my mind,’ the trolls wanna hear your music but they don’t wanna hear your opinion. Well, you can’t hear my music and not hear my opinion or hear what I’m going through… so you just want me to sing songs and shut up?
Brent Cobb, his ‘Shut Up And Sing’ off his last record… dude, you nailed it on that one buddy because they wanna hear what you have to say as long as the music is going, otherwise shut the fuck up because you’re gonna have some asshole in his underwear eating Cheetos ripping your face off on whatever social media.”
Amen… couldn’t have said it better myself.
If you haven’t had a chance to turn on Mercy yet, what are you even doing?
“How It Works”