

14 Jun

Cody Johnson - Slowdown - Outside

729 North 14th Street Omaha,NE
06/14/2018 8:00 PM - 06/14/2018 10:00 PM

2018-06-14 20:00:00 2018-06-14 22:00:00 America/Detroit Cody Johnson Slowdown - Outside info@wamza.com


Cody Johnson


"I got a lot of 'Who is this kid?'" Johnson says with a laugh two years later. "I love that. That was a new horizon. And I'm gonna work to make sure people know exactly who I am."

Johnson does that from the start in Gotta Be Me, a follow-up project that's loaded with solid country instrumentation and winsome melodies. In the first minute alone, he paints himself as a cowboy, raised on outlaw country, who drinks too much, fights too much and won't apologize for having an opinion. By the time the 14-track journey is over, he's shared his rodeo history in "The Only One I Know (Cowboy Life)," demonstrated his woman's influence in "With You I Am" and paid homage to his gospel heritage in "I Can't Even Walk."


"I'm a God-fearin', hard-workin', beer-drinkin', fightin', lovin' cowboy from Texas," he grins. "That's about it."

The hard-workin' part is key. The other parts are easily found in his music. It's intense, focused, sincere. And when he takes the stage, there's a Garth-like conviction to his performances. Johnson inhabits the songs, recreates their emotions because they're so familiar. And he's willing to lay bare those emotions because he's always been willing to risk. He lives in the moment behind that microphone, the same way he rode bulls in an earlier day.

"That's a very, very rough sport to be in," Johnson notes. "It's very, very rough on your body. It's very rough on your mind, and it's scary. I mean there's not a professional bull rider that won't tell you it's not scary. If it wasn't scary, we wouldn't do it."

Johnson pauses for just a beat.

"I'm kind of an adrenaline junkie."



"You could hear the music from those bars across that lake," he recalls. "I'd always hear somebody singing 'Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound' or something like that, and I always wondered what was going on across that water in those barrooms. It definitely intrigued me. I always wanted to go see what was on the other side of the tracks."


"Learning drums first taught me about feeling the song – feeling that dynamic of when it's supposed to be big and when it's supposed to be soft," he says. "I think that still sticks with me as a songwriter and as a performer, and in turn it's helped me shape my band, because I know what I'm looking for on every front."





"There's a lonely style of music that a lot of those guys listen to," Johnson says. "I worked in the field for a while, and they sang old prison work songs. Some had kind of lost hope, and I can see now that you have to sing about people that don't have hope the same way you want to sing to give them hope."



"It was a moment when I felt like I wasn't on my own anymore," Johnson says. "To have my fiancée at the time say 'I'm behind you, no matter what we have to do,' it gave me a whole new level of confidence that some people might have thought I already had. But I didn't."

Even with her belief, the road wasn't easy.

"I sacrificed, and I worked my tail," he says. "I barely slept for years trying to make this thing happen, and me and my wife didn't have a lot of groceries. We didn't have a lot of things for a long time."

Johnson reached a new creative plateau when he enlisted singer/songwriter Trent Willmon, who wrote Montgomery Gentry's "Lucky Man," to produce an album in Nashville. That project, A Different Day, raised the bar on Johnson's barroom ambitions. The studio musicians he worked with challenged his own band. Johnson grew – and his bandmates grew – because they had to stretch themselves to live up to the album on the road. That pattern has continued through three projects as he continues to chase something illusory.

"It's that always-never-good-enough kind of attitude that gives us that drive," Johnson says.


And Johnson's built up a Twitter following of 73,000 fans – impressive numbers for a guy who's marketed and developed his career without the aid of a major label.

He approached Gotta Be Me with two major objectives: to make yet another advance musically, and to provide an authentic self-portrait to that growing fan base still trying to figure out who this Cody Johnson guy really is. He worked with some of Nashville's best songwriters – including David Lee ("Hello World," "19 Somethin'"), Terry McBride ("Play Something Country," "I Keep On Loving You") and Dan Couch ("Somethin' 'Bout A Truck," "Hey Pretty Girl") – while drawing on his own history, rich with its own compelling subject matter.

"Every Scar" draws a life lesson from all those rodeo bruises and broken bones. "Half A Song" blends his barroom experiences with the melodic and rhythmic sensibilities he picked up at his daddy's feet. The fiddle-rich "Wild As You" embraces a freedom-loving woman whose sense of adventure is as deep as Johnson's own. And that spacious gospel closer, featuring his parents on harmony, surrenders some of the rabble-rousing, adrenaline-raising pieces of his past into bigger spiritual hands.

In essence, Gotta Be Me documents the life of a guy who's lived in the fast lane as a beer-drinkin', rodeo-ridin' cowboy, but who's also seen just enough darkness to temper that wild streak.

"You're only a couple bad decisions every day from screwing your whole life up," he reasons.

With a good woman behind him and a whole lot of promise in front of him, that's enough to keep Cody Johnson in check. The energy he put into his rebel years now goes into his work. He's not sure what he's chasing, but he knows it's paying off The "me" that Cody Johnson is becoming will continue to evolve, and it's his intent to share that journey in an honest, meaningful way. The same way that Haggard, Strait and Nelson did when they made their marks. When it's all said and done, the plan is mostly to reach the point where people are no longer asking "Who is this kid?"

"I don't want to be a blemish on country music," Cody Johnson says. "I don't want to be a dot. I'd like to be a mark."