Cody Johnson is standing just a few feet away from thousands of fans inside a sold-out arena, tuning them all out.
While the crowd inside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center reaches a fever pitch on a recent November night, awaiting Johnson’s first steps into the spotlight, one of the least likely mainstream country stars is hidden behind the stage with his cowboy hat in his hands, silently praying.
That moment of silence is a must for Johnson, and he’s been doing it for most of his 18-year career, since the days he played East Texas dive bars. The routine, Johnson explains, got him to the top of country music, and he wants it to keep him there.
“There’s a lantern, and there’s a roman candle,” Johnson tells Rolling Stone. “Roman candles go to the top really fast and then they fall. I’ve never wanted to be a roman candle.”
Instead, he just wanted to perform traditional country music, the kind that is presently surging after years of being dominated by programmed beats and bro aesthetics. Johnson is leading the charge.
“I’m very aware that I’m flying the flag for country music, but I don’t think about it too much,” he says. “If you think about it too much, it can change the course of your destiny, and I want to stay focused on exactly where I’m at.”
Following his moment of reflection, Johnson is onstage shouting — “We decided to bring a little bit of Texas up here to PA!” — and demanding fans, from the front row to the rafters, sing along, sway, and clap to his high-energy, hard-country set. The Philly show is sold out, just like the gig he’ll play the next night on the campus of Penn State University a few hours away.
“I never dreamed about being rich and famous,” he says. “I dreamed about playing country music that I believe in. I didn’t know that anything else came along with that, until — here I am at 37 years old, and the rich-and-famous thing kind of happened. But that was not the goal. All the years of playing barrooms and honky-tonks gave me this huge bag full of wisdom that I don’t think a lot of people have.”
A week earlier, Johnson performed the biggest show of his career so far. He headlined Globe Life Field — home of the Texas Rangers in Arlington — after selling out 40,643 seats the day they went on sale.
Johnson performs onstage in Philadelphia. Photo: Jay Trevino
“That meant a lot,” Johnson says. “My manager was maybe a little apprehensive wondering if we were doing a stadium show too quickly. But I was just like, we gotta do it. When it sold out so quickly, I called him, and he goes, “What’s up?’ and I said, ‘I freakin’ told you so!’ and hung up.”
Johnson cracks a big smile while he recalls all this in the front lounge of his tour bus a few hours before showtime in Philadelphia. He doesn’t need much in the way of press right now, but once a Rolling Stone profile was on the books, he took it as seriously as a show, alternating between locked-in candor and throw-your-hands-up laughter as he reflected on a string of breakthrough moments — the latest being the Globe Life Field concert and a deluxe re-issue of his 2023 album Leather.
“I already knew what we had,” Johnson says of recording Leather. “That’s rare. Most of the time, you have hopes: ‘I hope people like it. I hope we have some singles. I hope that these songs respond. I hope that the artwork didn’t seem hokey.’ But with Leather, it was ‘I know this is gonna be a big record. I know there’s gonna be some hit singles. And I know that Part II — the deluxe edition — is gonna be the icing on the cake.”
Johnson is aware he’s veering toward cockiness. “You have to contain that, because if you don’t, you can slip into some arrogance,” he says, hitting the brakes. “The easiest way to deafen success is to be arrogant about it — but confidence breeds success.”
On Wednesday night, Johnson will attend the 58th CMA Awards in Nashville loaded to the hilt with nominations — Male Vocalist of the Year, Album of the Year for Leather, Single of the Year for “Dirt Cheap,” plus two nominations for Music Video of the Year in “The Painter” and “Dirt Cheap.”
Those two songs, in particular, illustrate how far Johnson has come as an artist. He started as a songwriter with a publishing deal, but these days he draws on his songwriting roots to discern which tunes being pitched to him work best as “Cody Johnson songs.” “The Painter” (written by Benjy Davis, Kat Higgins, and Ryan Larkins) and “Dirt Cheap” (Josh Phillips) are prime examples.
“I could write a song that’s just for me, and people might go, ‘Wow, that’s a great Cody Johnson song.’ But I don’t think that I could write a song and have the next big artist go, ‘Man, that’s a hit, and I have to [record] it,’” he says. “There’s men and women in Nashville struggling day-in and day-out, and what they do is try to write great songs. I just threw the flag up and said, ‘Send ’em to me.’”
One of those songs was “‘Til You Can’t,” written by Ben Stennis and Matt Rogers. A tale of unwavering perseverance, the driving anthem won Johnson the 2022 CMA for Single of the Year and its writers the Grammy for Best Country Song in 2023.
Ultimately, it makes no difference whether Johnson walks away with more trophies at this year’s CMAs, but the nominations tap into an inherent competitive side of the Sebastopol, Texas, native, dating back to his time in rodeo.
Johnson, who first started singing in church, was a bull rider in his teens, and to this day an array of rodeo buckles accents his tour bus. He took a job as a prison guard in nearby Huntsville, Texas, when he turned 18, but kept at rodeo, accumulating enough broken bones to ensure that the rest of his life will be spent in some degree of pain. During his concerts, this manifests about halfway through the set, when he takes a seat on a barstool. In Philadelphia, after spending roughly an hour throwing himself around the stage like a blitzing linebacker, he brought out the stool and admitted to the crowd that they were witnessing bull-riding injuries taking their toll.
These days, Johnson has redirected his rodeo participation toward the much less brutal event of team roping — he launched his own championship event, the CoJo Open, in October.
“The playing field is even,” Johnson says of rodeo. “The day after our Arlington show — I’m big, bad Cody Johnson, just sold out the show, right? My friend Charly Crawford entered us in a team roping to benefit military veterans and their families. I didn’t know it, but they had placed me in the NFR showdown, meaning they had placed me with the top 15 teams in the entire world. It was like playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan. Nobody cared that I’d just sold out a stadium. Ego? Shot.
“But when I’m roping, out here working with these horses,” he continues, “the switch is so turned off that it might be the only time that music truly goes away.”
Not thinking about any other thing, be it music or rodeo, is a rarity these days. Johnson and his wife, Brandi, have two daughters. One moment, he’s country music’s reluctant superstar, the next he’s a husband and parent.
“What I have in my mind now is that switch. It’s one or the other. When I’m that guy at home, I turn the switch, and I am softball, volleyball, roping, riding horses, hunting, fishing with my kids, taking my wife on dates, taking out the trash, running her bathwater, doing the dishes,” he says. “Then, as soon as I pack the bag and I walk out the door, I flip the switch.”
As Johnson was starting that transformation into entertainer in Philly, Ashley McBryde and Braxton Keith — Johnson’s labelmates — were opening the show. McBryde is a seasoned pro, but the arena experience was a new one for the 24-year-old Keith. The Midland, Texas, native says he’s walking through doors that Johnson, as a Texas music artist, kicked down a decade ago, and is building upon it with his own hardcore, traditional country music.
“When I was a little kid in Midland, I was watching Cody from the crowd,” Keith says backstage. “The traditional sound that he has influenced my music, and that’s carrying on from the greats that were before us. That’s what is cool about it. You could go back to snap tracks, or you could do this the real way. He’s doing it the real way.”
After Keith’s set, Johnson meets him in the hall where the two share a handshake and a joke. The next night, the same lineup will play in State College, Pennsylvania, and Johnson promises there will be no interviews distracting him from catching Keith’s performance.
Johnson emerges from his tour bus backstage before a gig. Photo: Jay Trevino
The crescendo of Johnson’s headlining set, however, is not his crowd work — Johnson can rev up fans like few others — his own string of hits, or even unexpected covers of Jelly Roll’s “Son of a Sinner” and George Strait’s “The Chair.” Instead, the showstopper comes when he halts the concert to thank first responders and military service members. He calls out law enforcement, firefighters, and soldiers and asks them to hold up their hands, then requests the rest of the crowd remove their hats and honor them by singing “God Bless America.”
Such a display of patriotism and public gratitude is anything but unique in country music, but Johnson manages to pull it off in a way that centers his message to those who serve, while back-burnering politics. Onstage, he acknowledges Pennsylvania’s role in deciding the 2024 election, but before a mix of applause and boos can take hold, he quips, “I don’t care about that. What I want to know from all of you is who’s gonna win the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight tonight?”
Earlier in our interview, Johnson talked at length about the divisiveness that’s apparent in the U.S. He says that Americans are too quick to act out when things don’t go their way. “In the last few elections, I’ve seen one side or the other throw such a fit, and go to such great lengths to divide, because we didn’t get our way, and now we’re unhappy,” he says. “So now we’re gonna go burn cities down or we’re gonna go riot here. Or we’re gonna make Black hate white, or gay hate straight, and all this other stuff.
“I’ve gotten so tired of it,” he continues. “We have the greatest opportunities out of anyone in this entire world, because we’re Americans. Our forefathers founded this country, and our grandfathers fought and died, and people are still fighting and dying for our right to argue. I think we’ve been given too much leeway as Americans to say, ‘I didn’t get my way, and I’m gonna throw a fit.’ Guess what, man? Who cares who you voted for?… You may feel one way, and I may feel the other, but that does not mean that now we have to hate each other.”
To Johnson’s credit, none of this comes off as a front to woo fans. Before the show, while walking with his managers to a meet-and-greet, Johnson notices a Philadelphia police officer standing guard at a door and stops to thank them for being there. He’s not so much an heir to the “king of country music” throne, but rather a prison guard and rodeo cowboy who managed to scrape and claw his way onto arena stages and into the mainstream.
Aside from a pair of Las Vegas shows during the National Finals Rodeo in December, Johnson is finished with the road for the year. He resumes his U.S. run in January before hitting Europe for the C2C festivals, and other dates abroad, intent on delivering his kind of traditional country music, giving fans a show to remember, and just maybe bridging some gaps.
“I take a very athletic standpoint toward my tours. You always want to outdo the last one, and outdo the last one after that. But there have been so many big, significant things that have happened for us this year that it is clear the wave is starting to roll,” he says. “Now, we’ve gotta stay ahead of the wave.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.
