"Cody Rogers' My Heart is the Most Lonesome Rodeo is something you should hear on a car radio on a dark road, headlights bouncing across the blacktop, windows rolled down. It sounds like it's coming across a great distance, across time even, an album that has nothing in common with the slick retro plastic country that plays on so many terrible stations. These are songs delivered with authority and love, straight from the heart."
"There's a sad dive bar somewhere between heaven and hell, and Rogers's voice sounds like something you'd hear booming from the stage of that place. Shivery, deep, weathered. Kell Kellum's pedal steel chases behind like a ghost. The bounce is there too. And the strut. "Pistol Whipped," "Old Friend," "Martyr," and "$5 Cover" all tread wonderfully into Magnolia Electric Co. territory, that chugging tremble that makes it feel like there's no difference between attacking and being attacked."
"That's the thing about the truth," Rogers sings on "Hi-Beams." "It doesn't die, it just consumes." This serves as a sort of mission statement for him. He's occupied with the violence we do to each other, with the nature of belief, with mistakes and misjudgments and myths, with youth and age and the death of dreams. This is an album that could've only come out of the conflicted and complicated and Christ-haunted American South, a place of beauty both desolate and devastating, a place with blood on its hands and with tenderness in its heart."
"I'm thankful as hell for these songs. I'll carry them with me. They drive down dark roads, but they're full of hope. Hope for love, hope for reconciliation, hope for place, hope for humanity. 'A tree that can't grow will surely die' is the album's last line, and it's a fitting note to end on, Rogers reminding us how destructive hate and anger truly are. Carry these songs with you too. They're something to hold up against the doom that's trying to consume and crush us." - William Boyle
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"I Feel a Darkness"
The lyrics for I Feel a Darkness may sound like just distant affection, but its inspiration comes from a deeper, more rooted place in my life. My dad is a preacher, and his sermons and prayers are some of my earliest and memories. I was shaped by church pews, baptisms, and hellfire. Everything is on one side of the line, or it's on the other in that world. The day was the day, the night was night, good was good, and evil was evil. Because of this my brother and I didn't celebrate Halloween in the traditional sense growing up. I remember one particular Halloween when I was eight where my dad was out on the porch at night and was looking up at the full Halloween moon. Slightly unnerved and worried about him I asked him if something was wrong and he replied,"I feel a darkness tonight, Cody. Something evil is stirring." then he started to pray. This song, along with most of the album, live in the line 'I feel a darkness / a long shadow over us" from this. It is a song about two people who live in that grey line between light and dark who are both trying desperately to find a foothold to keep either from swallowing them whole."
"Pistol Whipped"
"I wrote Pistol Whipped during the height of the 2016 election and my frustrations of the ending of my former group "The Holy Ghost Electric Show." These two separate things consumed me and became one within the language and movement of this song. I wrote the line 'hammer down' as an anthem and reminder for myself that just because this is the hand dealt doesn't give people of this country the excuse to quit."
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"Good Friday"
"Good Friday almost didn't make it to the album, and I'm so glad it did because it might be my personal favorite on the album. In the studio, we were staring down the barrel of the final hours of the last day and my sound engineer,Bronson Tew, asked if there was anything else we wanted to try in the time we had left. I said I had one more finished that none of them had heard so we decided for me to play it and based off how it hit everyone in the room we'd decide whether to record it or not. I set up on the floor and played it for everyone in the control room. When it was over everyone was quiet, and then Bronson said, "Oh, for sure we are doing that one." And everyone broke out in laughter. Good Friday is about two people who are paths are diverging while neither what to acknowledge it is and let go. It's a celebration of grief only real love can bring."
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CREDITS
Cody Rogers - Vocals / Guitar
Kell Kellum - Pedal Steel
Spencer Thomas - Drums / Percussion / BGV
Dylan Lovett - Lead Guitar / BGV
Ethan Frink - Bass / Percussion / BGV
Andrew Bryant - Piano / Organ / BGV
Bronson Tew - Guitar / Organ / BGV
Recorded at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi
Engineered, mixed, and mastered by Bronson Tew
Produced by Cody Rogers
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