Cody Johnson Takes The CMA Fest Big Stage Friday
Cody Johnson plays the Nissan Stadium main stage on Friday night (6/7) at CMA Fest, and fans can look forward to an energetic set from this Entertainer of the Year nominated cowboy.
Cody performed on the big stage at CMA Fest for the first time last year and brought fans to their feet, bringing out country icon Reba McEntire to sing his song “Rodeo” with him.
Before he made his first CMA Fest main stage performance last year (2023), Johnson talked to us backstage and shared how excited he was to play CMA Fest in such a big way. He told us, “From working hard and personally, a long hard road of playing bars and honky tonks to get to the top where I get to step on the largest stage in America with country music fans. These people aren’t here to party for three days in a field; they are here to hear country music.”
Cody added, “To be on this lineup, especially for the 50th anniversary for me personally, I look back on all the years of work hard and never giving up, and I said, ‘Someday I’m gonna be able to play my brand of country music that sounds more traditional, has got a little cowboy in it, on a very large stage. So, it’s an incredible thing. We’re gonna try to burn this place down.”
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Johnson released his ACM-nominated Album of the Year, Leather, late last year. According to Cody, that project has twelve more songs and will be released at a later date.
Johnson told us how that came about in a recent interview, “We just went in and started recording, getting these songs, and we get to the end of the pile, and we’ve got twenty-four songs. We just did a whole album, but I love each one of these songs individually, so I leaned on Warner (his record label) and said, ‘How do I do this without doing another double album?'”
He then came up with an idea, “So, to get people to really digest and go through these twelve songs and to figure out what their favorites are, what their least favorites are, live with it a little while, then they can have the next twelve. It’s kind of like an appetizer entre situation. In doing that, I put all these songs next to each other to figure out what has similar themes and songs that touch on subject matters.”
He concluded, “Once I separated the songs twelve and twelve, then I started looking at it from a live aspect. I made my bread and butter in the last several years playing songs live, and so if you listen to this album, it should sound like a setlist.”
There is no word yet on when Cody will release the next twelve songs from what he is calling his Leather Deluxe project.
