Rivers are sacred.
In the 47th chapter of Ezekiel, a guide leads the prophet to a river flowing out from beneath the Temple in Jerusalem. On both of its banks grow “fruit trees of all kinds,” and the prophet is told their “leaves will not wither” and their fruit will never fail, because the water from the sanctuary keeps them eternally ripe.
Anyone who has spent enough time standing on the banks of a river has been nourished by the fruit of life. A mind surrounded by singing birds, fresh air, and flowing water is still – free from the burdens of living, grateful for the essential elements of being.
In 1690, a Spanish explorer named Alonso de León encountered a wide river in Texas and gave it a holy name: La Santísima Trinidad, the Most Holy Trinity. Three centuries later, a young man named Cody Johnson grew up on its banks, in a town called Sebastopol, Texas, where it flows into Lake Livingston.
More than two decades, ten albums, and countless shows into his career, Cody Johnson has found his way back to the river. Banks of the Trinity is about the people, places, and actions that return a man to stillness.
This album is not a great technical or artistic accomplishment, but it is itself a river. It flows through the many genres that have shaped Cody Johnson, and though each ripple and rapid carries its own fingerprint, they all run over the same bedrock: family, faith, and free living. In the wrong hands, a record like this gets laughed at. The closed-minded curmudgeons could classify it as a parade of country clichés. In Cody Johnson’s hands, it is truth delivered at the highest level. Not high art, and not especially inventive, but an honest depiction of what standing by the river means to this one man.
In an interview with Spotify, Cody Johnson described the new album as having “a vein down the middle of being very country,” but with Motown, bluegrass, blues, and rock running through it. The country is the riverbed, but what flows above keeps changing shape.
Songs like “Hello Lonesome” stay closest to the source. This piece of the lean neo-traditional swing that ruled the late ’80s and ’90s (the kind of thing you’d expect from Randy Travis, Keith Whitley, or Alan Jackson) is catnip for “real” country fans who, ironically, will find themselves enjoying a track that is essentially Jazz – the pop music of yesteryear. There are some wonderful Easter eggs to be found in this album and this song in particular. Listen to the moment just after he sings that “some Haggard sounds nice;” the guitar answers him with little fills lifted straight from the James Burton playbook.
“Motel Miss You” digs into a deeper bag of country classic tricks, riding rockabilly phrasing over a similar western-swing rhythm with gentle slide fills, a saloon-piano solo, and an ascending I→I6→Imaj7 figure (with a 5-6-7 walk up in the upper voice). That harmonic progression is the same one that runs through hundreds of compositions in the American musical canon, most notably Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.’ This is the kind of record Ricky Skaggs might have taken to number one in his prime.
Up above the deep currents of country, tracks like “I Want You” drift into late-’80s soft rock, with synth-pad textures and tumbling, resolving melodies reminiscent of Mark Knopfler’s main theme from the 1987 classic The Princess Bride. The droning, sustained lower voices paired with rolling melodies make for a pastoral tapestry, unembarrassed about being romantic. “Shoot the Bull,” his duet with Luke Combs, tucks (what sounds like at least) a Hohner Clavinet down in the low end, the same funky cluck that opens Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” And “Time Bomb” goes all the way to southern soul. It’s this collection of songs that showcases Johnson’s ear for music and aptitude for song selection.
Of course, it must be said that the power behind these songs is the voice that was awarded the CMA Award for Male Vocalist of the Year in 2025. In another singer’s hands, the more honky-tonk by number songs (e.g., “Fool Proof”) would be filler. Mr. Johnson’s twenty years of bars and arenas come through and elevate these tracks and shine over the more professionally composed tunes (see “Take Me Back (Leave Me There)” and “Every Man”).
The album, however, clumsily steps on its own feet at times. Country music, particularly songs and albums that tread over well-beaten thematic content (faith, family, freedom, alcohol, etc), often exists on a thin line between the earnest and the corny. Banks of the Trinity come very close to slipping over the edge to the wrong side of that line. It’s not the lyrics that misstep; it’s the production choices that are to blame. The vocal echoes tacked onto the ends of the choral phrases in “I Have” and “Cricket on a Hook” are tacky and unnecessary, pulling you out of the moment rather than drawing you in. “Bible for a Boy” leans on cymbal rolls that tip a sincere song toward cheese. None of these completely wreck the tracks. Still, a singer and performer like Cody Johnson is already believable and able to communicate the full emotional range of a song. He doesn’t need the help, and every time the production reaches for an easy effect, it cheapens something that was working fine on its own. The writing only lets him down once.
“Thank Somebody Country” sets the most basic rock-and-roll backbone under lyrics that have nothing clever or surprising to offer. It’s a noble idea, sung with obvious sincerity, but with nothing underneath for the voice to lift. It’s the one spot on the record where even Cody Johnson can’t make ordinary feel like truth.
In a recent interview with Country Central, Cody Johnson told a story. Twenty years ago, in the thick of a career nobody in Nashville was paying attention to, he sat in a San Angelo hotel room after a night of staying late into the night at a show so he could sell merch to get down the road. He turned on the TV and watched Willie Nelson tell the story of “Sad Songs and Waltzes” on Austin City Limits (a song Cody Johnson would later cover with the GOAT himself). Willie wrote that song after a record man told him sad songs and waltzes weren’t selling that year, and he cut it anyway as one of the best deep buts on Shotgun Willie. Johnson has told us that the moment kept him going. You can see why. He spent the better part of a decade making traditional country that the industry didn’t want, six albums he put out himself, one bar at a time, and he never stopped doing it his way.
He’s the reigning ACM Entertainer of the Year now. He broke George Strait’s attendance record at the Houston Rodeo. And with all of that behind him, he made a record about his kids and his wife and his God, about being a cowboy and about the still place a man returns to when the world has worn him down. Banks of the Trinity will not change country music, but like many good things, it is an honest telling of the peace given to those who appreciate the simple things in life.