Indie country star Cody Jinks thinks he did some kind of permanent damage to his voice singing thrash metal for years as a younger, angrier man. I don’t know about that. Based on the leathery suppleness and resonant baritone we hear on his new album In My Blood, not to mention on his Lefty Frizzell covers LP earlier this year, Jinks may have accidentally cured his larynx like good bacon, with just the right amount of fire and smoke. What we know is that thousands upon thousands of people have been lining up and piling in to hear the Fort Worth, TX native sing for about a decade now.
In Episode #329 of The String, Jinks talks about “years of cigarettes and whiskey and screaming and singing hard and playing honky tonks on the road two, three, four nights a week.” This was after being raised on country music and loving it. But when his hard rock years were over, he needed to make a difficult, vulnerable transition. “I figured out I could sing country, because I thought I could, and I had always sung it to myself. But I had never sung it in front of a crowd, so it was kind of scary,” he says. “So, yeah, I definitely went through (a) period that was really strange.”
Jinks didn’t abandon his rocker’s edge even as he mastered the art of country vocalizing and songwriting, and ever so gradually, he got a toe hold with his new outlaw persona among an audience that was ready for country truth and a rock and roll show. The album Less Wise of 2010 didn’t take off, but it gave him the anchoring manifesto of a song “Hippies and Cowboys.” The Adobe Sessions of 2015 went Gold. Then the double whammy of I’m Not The Devil and Lifers in 2016 and 2018 secured his career, pretty much in the nick of time.
“My wife and I were 37 years old before we were out of debt,” he says, volunteering more candor about money than most successful artists tend to share. A $2 million publishing deal and amphitheater-scale shows swung their fortunes wildly in about 2017. “And I’m like, I don't even know what just happened. You know, I've been scared for the last 15 years of making a house payment.”
None too soon, because the pandemic put the whole operation under stress again. But they had money in the bank. “When Covid hit, nobody missed a paycheck,” he says. “We didn't even have to tour. I paid my whole band, my whole crew. Damn, dude, I guess we were making hay when the sun was shining.”
Jinks took that big pause as a big reality check, chiefly by quitting drinking and reconnecting in profound ways with his wife and two children. Here and there on In My Blood, this theme emerges - regret for lost time while so obsessively on the road and a fixation on going forward with a clear mind and open heart. “Everything’s been better,” he says but not without work. “You’ve gotta learn how to walk and talk again. You gotta learn how to ride on an airplane sober. You gotta learn how to walk on stage sober. And I was like, how’s the writing? The writing never suffered. It's arguable that it's gotten better - maybe more thoughtful, maybe less angry.”
You’ll hear this with clarity and no small amount of cleverness on the album’s opening track “Better Than The Bottle.” Jinks says it depicts a conversation he had with an old friend, co-writer and running buddy after they’d both quit drinking. They talked into the night and by the time they’d followed up with texts and voice memos, they had a winner about living the high life into old age, just without being so high. “Been layin' things down one habit at a time, Never thought we'd get old, Now we're damn sure tryin', And makin' the most of the time that we have left,” Jinks sings.
We also talk about his excellent Lefty Frizzell album, his longtime creative partner, bass player and album producer Joshua Thompson, the musical tutelage of his son who’s been appearing on stage recently, and Cody’s signature hat, whose origin story I guess with uncanny accuracy. Jinks continues his relentless touring across the country until the end of the year.
