“I wanted 16 well-rounded songs that all give you a piece of me musically, give you a piece of me personally.” Cody Johnson blurs the lines between traditionalist country and American roots music. At 16 tracks, Cody Johnson’s 10th studio album isn’t exactly compact. Given the country superstar’s tendency toward maximalist double LPs, though, Banks of the Trinity serves as a more cohesive—if also more sonically adventurous—look at CoJo’s take on the country genre, which revels in blurring the lines between traditionalist fare and the broader umbrella of American roots music. “I wanted 16 well-rounded songs that all give you a piece of me musically, give you a piece of me personally, give you the laidback, easy voice of ‘I Want You’ versus some of these other ones like ‘Horseback’ where it’s energetic and up in your face,” Johnson tells Apple Music. “There needs to be a little blues. There needs to be a little Motown. There needs to be a little bit of rock ’n’ roll, a little bluegrass, a little old-school country, a little bit of progressive country.” Highlights on Banks of the Trinity include its title track, on which Johnson gets to wax nostalgic about his East Texas upbringing, and “Bible for a Boy (For Jaycee)”, a tender ballad dedicated to Johnson’s youngest child and only son. Johnson invites a couple of friends to chip in too, as Brothers Osborne join in on “Fool Proof”, with TJ Osborne’s velvety baritone playing nicely off Johnson’s own muscular voice. Luke Combs brings his own vocal prowess to “Shoot the Bull”, an ode to blowing off steam at a dive bar. Below, Johnson shares insight into several key tracks. “Horseback” “It’s a great time. It’s hilarious. It’s fun. It’s really hard to play on the guitar, ironically enough. I didn’t figure that out until we started rehearsing it.” “Banks of the Trinity” “That song just took me back to so many memories I had of fishing on the Trinity River and hunting in those river bottoms. I wanted to express a piece of myself that we don’t usually talk about in interviews. I mean, you think back to the album Leather where it’s got my hands and they’re bloody and sweaty and you see all the cows and stuff. But I literally picked that song and picked the album art just to spark conversations where I could say things about my childhood.” “I Have” “It’s weird, but mostly women relate to this song, because I think that a lot of men are kind of afraid to be that vulnerable, and that’s what it is. There was a lot of very dark times to get to this sunshine and rainbow experience that I’m having now. Sleazy hotel rooms and no money and tinkering with alcoholism or drug problems or whatever, anger issues, whatever it was. I wanted people to know, ‘Hey, when you look at me, please don’t put me on a pedestal. I’m doing the best I can just like you.” “Cricket on a Hook” “I remember 2021, we had a ton of these grasshoppers and they were killing our hay product. The production was nothing because all these grasshoppers were there. I took my girls and was like, ‘Get a bucket. We’re going to go get as many of these crickets or these grasshoppers or whatever they are and we’re going to use them.’ They’re like, ‘For what?’ I’m like, ‘Bait. We can catch perch on them.’ And me and my girls actually went down and caught perch on these crickets or grasshoppers or whatever. So when I heard that song, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, cricket on a hook. We’ve done that.’ Even little tongue-in-cheek, fun stuff like that is very real.” “Yippy Ty Oh Hey Hey” “I wrote that one by myself. One of the lines in that song was ‘There’s dirt on my girt and blood on my saddle horn.’ One of my best friends—Colby Lovell back home, world champion team roper—when his grandfather, who’s a big cattle man back where I’m from, whenever his grandpa passed away, they wanted to put his saddle in front of the casket. A bunch of people wanted to clean it up, and he said, ‘Leave the dirt on the girt. He earned the dirt on that girt.’ And so, little stuff like that, that I pulled and put in these songs, there’s a lot of little hidden Easter eggs in this album for sure, but without being so forthcoming that I say, ‘Here’s my life. Y’all can see every bit of it.’”