“You can be a badass for a long time,” Cody Jinks asserts, “and then age and wisdom and a lot of other things catch up with you. You realize that you’re not as badass as you thought you were.”
The 44-year-old Texan has worn badass on his sleeve from the get-go, cutting the coolest figure in country music for the better part of a decade in his brash voice, hard-living lyrics, and modern long-haired outlaw. He’s done it while staying fiercely independent and carrying the torch for a generation of artists forcing such a lifestyle back into the country music lexicon. He still embodies all those traits, but Jinks says there’s more to him now. He’s a parent. He’s a frontman who made it big shunning record labels, and he’s got a band and crew whose livelihoods depend on him keeping it up. He’s sober, and has been since 2023.
That’s what was on Jinks’ mind when he wrote and recorded In My Blood, the 11-track record he dropped on Friday and is celebrating with a sold-out concert at Colorado’s venerable Red Rocks Amphitheater this weekend. It’s not so much that Jinks suddenly became serious for his 11th studio LP. His music has always been serious, badass or otherwise. Rather, Jinks sees this record as a fresh snapshot of the life he’s living now, a little more than a year after his 2024 album, Change the Game.
“I hope that people think this is one of their favorites,” Jinks tells Rolling Stone. “All my records are personal. It’s just the order of my life put on recordings. Change the Game, I think, was the end of part one of the book. This record is part two of the book. I am not the same guy that wrote Less Wise or Adobe Sessions. There’s not as much bravado in this.”
There is a parallel, though, between In My Blood and Adobe Sessions, the 2015 record that became Jinks’ breakout and has since been certified gold. Both were recorded at the Sonic Ranch outside of El Paso, Texas, and both were produced by Charles Godfrey. Jinks’ longtime bassist Joshua Thompson co-produced the current project with Godfrey. A few of the songs, namely “See the Man” and “Lost Highway,” have been in Jinks’ catalog for two decades, waiting for their moment, but the bulk of the songs are brand new.
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As with all of his albums, Jinks passed on session musicians and brought his band with him to Sonic Ranch. The combination of introspection and camaraderie, he says, created an aura he’d never felt in the studio before.
“I walked into the studio, and there were about 20 people scurrying around,” Jinks says. “We were set to record eight songs, and I said, ‘God, give me a reason to stop. I will stop right now and send everybody home.’ We had the best session I’ve ever had. There wasn’t a day we couldn’t find the fucking gremlin in the wires, for whatever reason. It was the most harmonious session. Everything clicked. Everybody jelled. It was such a lovely experience, and we got a great record out of it. I took that to mean I wasn’t supposed to stop.”
One of the songs that fans of Jinks have likely heard already is “Better Than the Bottle,” a tale of redemption between two friends putting their destructive, bad-for-one-another ways behind them. When Jinks hits the refrain of, “Still a vice or two, but they’re better than the bottle,” it’s easy to wonder how autobiographical he’s getting. He says it’s all a true story.
“I wrote it with Tom McELvain, a dear friend of mine,” Jinks says. “He came over, and he had quit drinking some years back. I quit almost a couple of years back. Tom and I were hard on ourselves and bad for each other. After being friends for 20-plus years, he came over in January, and said, ‘I wanted you to see me sober.’ That song was written after a very heartfelt conversation between the two of us.”
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The title track is another lament, and it involves another friend of Jinks. “In My Blood” is a crooning, bluesy waltz that doubles down on Jinks’s dedication to independence, and to letting his life flow directly into his music. He co-wrote it with Blackberry Smoke frontman Charlie Starr, and the two turned it into a duet. Jinks calls it the most effortless co-write he’s had.
Blackberry Smoke and Jinks toured together in summer 2024. Jinks’ band and crew mesh seamlessly with the long-time Southern rock mainstays, and after a break in the tour, the two frontmen decided they had a song on their hands.
“I said, ‘Man, you know what I love about you guys? You guys aren’t in the music business,’” Jinks recalls. “’You’re just a really rad band that likes to get together and play fun shows.’ Charlie kind of reiterated that sentiment from them to us as well. We all try to be super easy to work with. It should be fun. We get to do this for a living. It’s a privilege. Charlie very much looks at it that way, and we both feel that music chooses you.
“It’s two guys that have been doing it a long time, and did it the road dog way.”
They debuted the song on the same tour soon after writing it. Jinks said they practiced it three times before taking it to the stage. Starr didn’t just sing on the track, either. He laid down the guitar solo — “gnarly” in Jinks’ words — with his favored 56 Les Paul.
“We were talking about this life that we lead out here traveling,” Starr tells Rolling Stone. “And making music is ingrained in us so deeply there would never be any hope of removing it. It’s literally in our blood. The song basically wrote itself.”
Jinks is in the middle of a headlining run, named the Hippies and Cowboys Tour after his 2010 song that became one of his signatures. He’ll spend August and September touring the East Coast and Midwest, bringing Shane Smith and the Saints and Tanner Usrey with him for several dates, before a fall acoustic tour with Ward Davis and a two-night National Finals Rodeo residency at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas in December.
By the end of the year, he’ll have logged more than 50 shows — a far cry from his early 30s when he estimates he played as many as 210 shows a year and spent 270 days on the road. He says that once he realized he’d built a self-sustaining independent touring outfit for himself that he needed to slow down.
“It’s taken us a long time to get here,” he says. “Most of the guys have kids. We’re not on the road 200 days a year anymore. We’ve been on the road for most of our kids’ lives, and I said, ‘Guys, I’m tired of doing that, and I’m sure y’all are too.’ We’re spending more time at home. The fact of the matter is, once you’re in your 40s and 50s, you don’t need to be out there playing a hundred shows, two hundred shows a year. You’ll just oversaturate everything.”
His team rolled out new stage production and lights for this tour, promising a fresh look to match the album Jinks insists is a fresh chapter in his life and music. It’s a luxury, sure, but it’s one he’s been chasing since he was a teenager in Fort Worth fronting a thrash metal band in the late 1990s. He wanted to write, play, and perform music on his terms, and he’s on the payoff end of it all now. In My Blood simply flowed effortlessly in the wake.
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“Satisfaction is a great word,” Jinks says, summing it all up. “I find it satisfying that we’re not beholden to anybody. We don’t have to make a certain amount of records, and I’m not throwing songs on a record to fulfill an obligation to a record company, where it doesn’t matter if I give a shit if it’s bad or good. We don’t have that. We go into the studio because we have great songs to record. We record with the same band that you see on stage, and in country music nowadays, you don’t see that. We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want to do it.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.