Last February, during a break from touring with Miranda Lambert, we got to catch up with our ol' pal Cody Johnson. At the time, man, 2020 was teed up to be a huge year for the Texas native.

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He had just been nominated for CMA New Artist of the Year, his music had just collectively surpassed 1 billion streams, he was gaining new footing with a national audience, and he was working on a brand new album. But of course a few weeks after our sit-down the world came to grinding halt, thanks to that damn worldwide pandemic.

Fast forward a little of a year, and the world is opening back up. Shows are happening, tours are actually filling up calendars, and Cody Johnson is back on stage and readying the release of this long-awaited album of songs that were actually written in the '90s.

If you hadn't heard, toward the end of 2019 word started getting out that "The Great 20th Century Cody Johnson Song Search" was launched. Cody and his team set out to find songs that had been written in the '90s. "We specifically asked for songs that were written pre-2000," Johnson told us. "I wanted stuff that other artist wouldn't cut because [they thought] it couldn't work on country radio... There are a million songwriters I could name right now that stopped getting hits after the '80s and '90s because they couldn't adapt to [writing the new] type of country music.

Well, here we are 15-months later and CoJo just dropped more details about the new album on Whiskey Riff Raff podcast. Here’s what he said regarding recording a double album:

“I had too many good songs. There was such an outpouring of songs that other artists wouldn’t look at… whether it was their labels, their publicists, or whoever… they’re just good country songs. I felt like ‘why not?’ We’ve got the time off, we’ve got the opportunity, we got the means, let’s go cut ’em... I got to take Side A and Side B, and I sat down for about 3 hours the other day and kind of cross referenced what songs have similar tempos, what songs have similar feels, what songs have similar subject matters… and separate those and pair those songs up on Side A and Side B… so you’re really getting two albums.”

That's not all. Turns out Cody has been very busy during his "time off". His new album officially titled Human: The Double Album, will be out in October, he's got that duet with Willie that he told us about last year coming out this week. Plus his long-awaited documentary, Dear Rodeo: The Cody Johnson Story will be released in August, and he’s got a Christmas album coming this year too.

CoJo has been busy.

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