State Champ Radio Country
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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
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Day three of the California country fest went out with plenty of big names, big moments and big surprises.
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Day two of the California country fest was dominated by rising stars enjoying victory lap moments, but also included plenty of big looks for veteran hitmakers.
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Jelly Roll gave the biggest crowd he’d ever played to their money’s worth, with a cavalcade of starry cameos.
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Returning favorites and pleasant surprises marked the highlights from Friday (Apr. 26) at the California country festival.
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The more you watch of Lana Del Rey supposedly going country, the more apparent how ridiculous any talk of her pivoting to any genre really is.
For 15 years now, LDR has essentially been a genre unto herself: a unique and borderline-illogical blending of obviously classic influences with some game-changingly modern sensibilities, one that mostly befuddled critics and radio and the charts early on, even as she was inarguably becoming one of the most important pop stars of her generation. She’s been wildly influential without ever being less than unmistakable; no matter what sonic, thematic or characteristic elements other artists may borrow from her, none of them would ever risk being taken for Lana herself. This is all to say: no matter what style of music she’s making, Lana Del Rey has one genre and that’s “Lana Del Rey.”
But of course, Lana did lean into The Stagecoach of It All while making her debut performance at the Indio, Calif. country festival on Friday (Apr. 25). Singing in a white dress in front of a set of an idyllic-looking rural house at dusk, she looked like she walked on stage straight from an old Loretta Lynn album cover. Early on, she brought out George Birge — himself a Saturday performer at the festival — to duet on his current hit “Cowboy Songs,” an extremely country radio-friendly song Del Rey says she can’t get enough of. (You can certainly imagine a Lanafied version of the chorus, though it was strange to hear her singing on such a zippy and muscular hook in 2025.) And of course, she invoked two all-time genre classics during the show by covering Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” (“You can’t do this set without it”), and then closing the proceedings with a family singalong to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” a recent entry into the LDR cover canon.
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But the new songs? Country-ish in their tempo and in some of their thematic content (and occasional lyrics about “all these country singers”), perhaps, but not in any way that feels at a remove from what she’s done her whole career: Lana has long centered the emotional abandon and cinematic sway of country in her songs. You could hear that even in some of the crowd-elating classics Lana performed in the midst of her Grand Ole Opry moment — tweak a couple lyrics and add some banjo and “Ride” is basically a The Chicks single; turn down the sex and turn up the sarcasm and “Video Games” could’ve been penned by Kacey Musgraves. Nothing about the stately balladry and gender-role explorations of songs like set-opening duo “Husband of Mine” and “Henry, Come On” felt without precedent in her catalog; she could have introduced them as deep cuts from Blue Banisters or Chemtrails Over the Country Club and many of her fans probably would’ve bought it.
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If there was a pronounced difference with Del Rey in Country Mode on Friday night, it was that she seemed… maybe more polite and unassuming than we’re used to her being? Watching her express her very sincere-seeming gratitude at being invited to Stagecoach, and about the size and passion of her Friday night crowd, it was very easy to forget that she was once a highly divisive figure in popular music, one prone to controversy in both her lyrics and public statements. There was no trace of any of that in the smiling, hostly, happy-to-be-here performer who took the stage on Friday night.
Well, almost none. If you missed a little of the unpredictability and ostentatiousness that characterized early-years Lana Del Rey– and still informed highlights from her work up until this decade — then you probably loved “57.5,” a shuffling new song referring to her number (in millions) of monthly listeners on Spotify, which also includes a bridge which begins with LDR proclaiming “I kissed Morgan Wallen” and going onto advise listeners against going ATVing with him. It takes a lot of “yes, really” to explain, but it was still probably the best of the new songs that she debuted: some real country s–t, but more importantly, pure Lana through and through, in a way no other artist or genre could ever totally capture.
