Country
SiriusXM has teamed up with Morgan Wallen to launch the exclusive SiriusXM channel Morgan Wallen Radio. The limited-run channel launches Thursday (May 1) and runs through May 31, coinciding with the upcoming release of Wallen’s new album I’m the Problem on May 16. Morgan Wallen Radio is available to subscribers in their cars on channel […]
Lainey Wilson is set to make her feature film debut, Variety reports. The country star is set to appear in the upcoming film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s book Reminders of Him, with the movie set to release on Feb. 13, 2026. The Universal film, directed by Vanessa Caswill, will also reportedly include actors Nicholas Duvernay, […]
Megan Moroney and Kenny Chesney were tourmates last year on Chesney’s Sun Goes Down Tour, and now the two country artists are set to release a collaboration, “You Had to Be There,” on May 9.
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Moroney revealed the title and an audio clip of the upcoming collaboration on her social media accounts, and included what seemed to be more of the song’s lyrics, captioning the photos, “7 years later got a different point of view.” She also shared a carousel of photos, including one shot of her ticket purchase from a Chesney show at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta that she attended in 2018, followed by photos of Moroney performing on Chesney’s tour last year.
The “Out Last Night” singer commented on Moroney’s Instagram post, writing, “As far as I know, this is the first song anyone has written for me. Thank you, Megan. I love ya,” and adding blue heart and palm tree emojis.
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During Chesney’s Sun Goes Down Tour, the two previously collaborated on a version of Moroney’s “Am I Okay?” and outside of tour life, the two singers seem to have forged a tight-knit friendship, with Moroney even being the one to introduce Chesney to the realm of TikTok.
Later this year, Chesney will be inducted as one of the newest members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, alongside music executive Tony Brown, and the late June Carter Cash. Chesney has long been a champion of uplifting female artists, previously welcoming Kelsea Ballerini to open shows on his I Go Back Tour in 2023; the two Knoxville-area natives also recorded the song “Half of My Hometown,” which won musical event of the year and video of the year at the Country Music Association Awards.
Meanwhile, Moroney is nominated for female artist of the year and for album of the year (for Am I Okay?) at the upcoming Academy of Country Music Awards. She was also honored during Billboard‘s annual Women in Music event earlier this year.
See Moroney’s announcement below:
Today’s music executives pay particular attention to on-demand consumption. If a listener chose a particular song, rather than simply hearing something that came up randomly, it’s fairly safe to assume that the song had greater value to them.
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But, new artist Chase McDaniel argues, real-time listening might very well have more impact on listeners in certain situations since there’s a surprise element involved in the experience.
“There’s probably three times in my life that I can say a song changed my life, and it was always on country radio,” he says. “In this day and age, when you can go and select the song and play it yourself, or you go to some playlist and it’s this [artificial intelligence]/robot thing, it takes away the meaning. But when you hear it played on the radio, and it’s at the right time, and you don’t know why it’s on right now, and it feels like it’s for you, it feels divine.”
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McDaniel hopes his first radio single — “Burned Down Heaven,” released by Big Machine to country radio through PlayMPE on March 17 — has that kind of effect on those who hear it. It certainly had psychological value for McDaniel, since it forced him to confront a painful chapter from his past.
“[It was] this low point, just covered in shame and in guilt and loneliness, knowing what you’ve done and not being able to fix it,” he says. “That’s truly what that lyric’s kind of pointing to.”
Just as McDaniel’s been surprised a few times by a song on the radio, he was surprised by “Burned Down Heaven.” It emerged from a conversation with his grandfather, who was reflecting on his relationship with his wife.
If he were forced to choose, his grandfather said, “I think I would turn down heaven for your mamaw.”Preparing on Feb. 13, 2024, for the next day’s writing appointment, McDaniel started working with that “turn down heaven” phrase as a possible title. But on one run-through, he was shaken by a small mistake.
“I accidentally said the phrase ‘burned down heaven,’ as if it fell from the sky,” he remembers. “It was like it came from my subconscious. I literally felt like I got struck by lightning, because saying the phrase ‘burned down heaven’ felt like the worst imaginable thing that anyone could say.”
If the thought hit him that hard, then it might have some emotional value for other people, too, so he considered bringing it up the next morning, though he had some reservations: The idea of setting fire to heaven might offend some listeners. So he held it back when he showed up to write with Jon Nite (“Dancin’ in the Country,” “Break Up in the End”) at the Nashville studio of writer-producer Lindsay Rimes (“World on Fire,” “Heaven”). After they ran through some other ideas, McDaniel finally brought up “Burned Down Heaven,” and when he explained the metaphor, both co-writers were up for it. They started with the chorus, to make sure they landed the idea effectively, and to make the best use of McDaniel’s range.
“He’s got some of the [Jon] Bon Jovi [power] up there, but he’s also got some of the Josh Turner [richness],” Rimes says. “It’s those kinds of dynamics in his vocals. I wanted to bring both of those through, because they’re kind of a strong part of his brand.”
They pitched the chorus in a high range to create an explosive effect. They also massaged the stanza’s opening lyric to better address McDaniel’s nervousness about the title.
“It was really Jon’s idea to say, ‘Hey, let’s bring this back to Earth,’” McDaniel recalls. “When I said, ‘Feels like I burned down heaven,’ he said, ‘Where was it at?’ And I was like, ‘It was in this driveway.’ He’s like, ‘There it is: Feels like I burned down heaven in that driveway.’ It brought it back to planet Earth. It made it real.”
They focused on the fiery part of the title in the chorus, incorporating “matches,” “ashes” and “smoke,” though the words were slipped in subtly. When they got to the lower-pitched verses, they shifted to the spiritual part of the title, though they handled the religious allusions so lightly that they almost go unnoticed. “You want to feel like it’s real,” Nite says. “You want to feel like you’re in the emotion of this moment, rather than cute little sayings about heaven.”
McDaniel didn’t talk much about it during the write, but he built the storyline around a difficult breakup from his past. “It was definitely the best thing — I realized that over time — but it was something that I still hadn’t forgiven myself for,” he says. “Anytime that I feel like I’ve made a mistake or hurt somebody, it just weighs on me, and so I carried it for years.”
Despite all of McDaniel’s concerns going into the appointment, it all developed easily. They started at 11 a.m. and had a demo and vocal performance of the completed song by 1:30 p.m. In fact, while Rimes and McDaniel worked on the demo, Nite went to the backyard and started another song that also got finished that day.
The “Burned Down Heaven” demo was so well developed that they used it as a foundation for the final tracking session at Nashville’s Sound Stage with drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Tony Lucido, keyboardist Alex Wright and guitarists Ilya Toshinskiy and Sol Philcox-Littlefield.
“I don’t think a lot changed once the band was on there,” Rimes says. “Obviously, there’s live drums and stuff like that, but the basic bones of the song were in there.”
McDaniel recut his vocal for the master version, singing the first verse and first chorus separately, so that his voice could overlap with itself as he transitioned into that chorus. The final touches were provided by Gideon Klein, a musician that Rimes hired to arrange strings and overdub all of the parts.
Big Machine released it on Valentine’s Day — exactly one year after it was written — and it performed well enough that the label issued it to radio a month later as fans presumably gravitated toward the honesty in McDaniel’s story.
“All the guys that listen to it are like, ‘You know what? I’ve been this sometimes, and I just have been too proud to say it,’” Nite says. “All the girls are like, ‘I’ve had five boyfriends that do this, and they’ve been too proud to say it, and it’d be amazing if somebody actually said it was their fault.’ I think that’s why it’s caught fire a little bit.”
For his part, McDaniel hopes that someone might hear “Burned Down Heaven” on the radio and have the same unexpected life moment that he’s experienced with the platform.
“I’m on a mission now in country music to spread the light and tell people that they matter and that they’re important,” McDaniel says. “This song isn’t straight up about mental health and survival, but it is reflective of shame. Anytime that you can’t live with your mistakes and you can’t accept the past and you can’t forgive yourself, it makes it hard.”
Post Malone and Jelly Roll kicked off their BIG ASS Stadium tour on Tuesday night (April 29) with a three-and-a-half hour extravaganza at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City, UT that featured both men playing their hits and fan favorites as well as Jelly jumping up on stage for a duet with Posty. Coming off […]
Eric Church is already gearing up for the release of his new album, Evangeline vs. The Machine on May 2, but this fall he will take that new project on the road when he launches his Free the Machine Tour, with 22 arena shows starting Sept. 12. Joining Church on varying dates on the tour […]
Country-rocker Cody Jinks is set to release a new album, titled In My Blood, on July 25.
He recorded the upcoming project, which will come out on his own Late August Records, at famed The Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, and worked alongside musicians David Colvin, Joshua Thompson (also a co-producer on the album), Jake Lentner, Chris Claridy, Austin Tripp, Matt Nolen, Drew Harakal and Lenny Castro.
Produced by Thompson and Charles Godfrey, In My Blood follows his 2024 album Change the Game which landed in the top 30 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and featured songs such as “Outlaws and Mustangs.”
“I think that Change the Game was the final chapter in part one of my writing and I just opened up part two,” Jinks told Billboard via email. “Kind of like how an author like Stephen King has part one that has 10 chapters, and then there’s part two. So, I think In My Blood starts part two. That’s how I feel about this record. It’s a very, very reflective record, and hopefully optimistic about the future as well.”
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While Change the Game centered on lessons learned through his journey of sobriety and maturity, the new album finds him in a further reflective mood on songs such as the road-dog song “In My Blood,” the nostalgic “When Time Didn’t Fly” and the hopeful “Found.”
The album features a mix of songs written solo by Jinks, as well as songs he co-wrote Ward Davis, Tennessee Jet, Ray Wylie Hubbard and Blackberry Smoke’s Charlie Starr, among others. Each song features Jinks’s fearless, unapologetically honest style of songwriting and hard-charging musical style, adding to his storied canon of music.
His debut single from the album, “Found,” will be out May 2, while he is also slated to launch his headlining Hippies & Cowboys Tour in Columbia, Missouri later this month.
Below, Jinks details the making of In My Blood to Billboard.
Cody Jinks
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You recorded this project at The Sonic Ranch. What do you love about recording there?
I fell in love with the Sonic Ranch during the recording process of [2015’s] Adobe Sessions. I love having nowhere else to go but to the studio to make music, because there’s nothing out there. You’re completely isolated in the desert, and it’s 45 minutes to the next town. I’ve recorded a lot of work out there because of that very thing, and Tony [Rancich] has created a magical place like no other that will ever exist.
Was there a particular song that really sparked the beginning for this project?
Not really. There was a song [“Better Than the Bottle”] that was one of the last ones written that became the first track, because it really set the tone for what the record was going to be. So that was fun. I love how records take shape like that on their own often time.
The title song was co-written with and features Blackberry Smoke’s Charlie Starr. How did this song come about?
Charlie and I wrote this song while we were on tour together, last year, and debuted it the day we finished it in Canandaigua, New York. Obviously, since then, we recorded it, he came out to the studio and sang and played on it. We just got done doing a bunch of promo for it in Nashville, as well. He’s a great human being, and it’s the perfect song for him and I to have written together.
There seems to be such a synergy between what you do and what the guys in Blackberry Smoke do. Why do you love performing and creating with them?
That’s how that song really came to be. I love those guys because they aren’t in the music business. Blackberry Smoke is just a kick-ass band that’s been doing it the right way, the honest way, the hard way, the pure way, for a very long time. They are a very important piece of American music, and I’m thankful that we get to play with them. The friendship is more me and Charlie having hung out more than anybody else. When we were playing with those guys, there was always some of their guys watching our show and vice versa.
So, I think the mutual respect was there, and we see everybody in catering, and hang out, and guys would chat here and there. I think Charlie and I have found out we have a whole lot of things in common in just doing it the old school way, just the get in the van and go. And being thankful to still having a place in music.
“When Time Didn’t Fly” is really poignant. What is the backstory?
I wrote that song with Channing Wilson and Kendall Marvel on a Zoom write, four years ago or so, during COVID. I think at that time a lot of people were given time to reflect. All being at the age that we’re at, and given time to think about time… where did it go? Just the joys of childhood, how fun was it to do those things? The true joy that seems to not happen as much, the older you get. It’s a beautiful song, my mom loves that song, it’s the best on this new album. I really, really love that song. It’s a longing for innocence that only the youth are capable of having.
What is the story behind “The Others”?
We are the others. Everybody’s the others, actually. We all like the same things as everybody else, and we all like different things than everybody else. I wrote it with Ray Wylie Hubbard and Tennessee Jed. [After we were all at a festival], we ended up writing a song via text. “The Others” is just a cool tune written by two really, really cool guys and me. It’s one that we’re going to make a music video for. We’re really, really excited about this one being a single because at the end of the day, everybody’s just everybody. We’re all just people.
What do you most hope fans take away from this project?
I hope that if you really dive into the lyrics of this record, you find yourself, you find people, and you find letting go of the past and the things that hold you down, and looking forward to the things that are good for you. It’s about finding yourself, about being thankful, about becoming more reserved, and growing up. It’s a pretty wild ride, so the record reflects that. Our band made this record sound like it does.
They did a great job taking the simple songs that I brought them and making amazing pieces of music out of it. Josh Thompson, producing with Charles Godfrey, and our band having the freedom and the leeway to go in there with thoughtful and creative pieces that weren’t just laid down because they sounded all right, they were really crafted. It’s as pure a piece of art as we can possibly put out, as any band could ever possibly hope to put out. This is as pure as it gets, and I’ve often said that I’m thankful that the fans have grown up with us, and grown up with me, and here’s to looking forward and making it better.
In My Blood tracklist:
Better Than the Bottle
Lost Highway
The Others
In My Blood
Something Wicked This Way Comes
See the Man
When You Can’t Remember
Lonely Man
Monster
Found
When Time Didn’t Fly
In February, when Post Malone and Jelly Roll announced they planned to join forces for the BIG ASS Stadium Tour, it made perfect sense. After all, the pairing takes two artists with deep roots in hip-hop who have crossed multiple genre borders throughout their musical adventures, both embracing rock, pop and country and proving equally […]
Before Jelly Roll sang a bit of Miley Cyrus‘ “Flowers” to tens of thousands of fans as the day 2 headliner of Stagecoach on Saturday night, the country superstar got a little practice in with his wife, Bunnie XO. Bunnie shared a video of the couple making their way to the Mane Stage over the […]
Shaboozey is gearing up for his headlining tour dates of 2025. After taking the stage at both Coachella and Stagecoach, the “Amen” singer announced the stops on his Great American Roadshow tour on Monday morning (April 28). The outing is slated to kick off on Sept. 22 at the Egyptian Room at Old National Centre […]