You want real? THIS is real.
Cody Jinks’ highly-anticipated After The Fire, his first of two records being released in the next 7 days, hit shelves today, and I’ll tell you what, Cody just put on a clinic. If you’re want to know what it looks like to write and record real country music, look no further.
One track that caught my attention right from the start is “Tell ‘Em What It’s Like,” a gut-wrenching commentary about what it’s really like to be married to Cody. Written through the lenses of Cody’s wife Rebecca, “Tell ‘Em What It’s Like” digs neck-deep into the loneliness, anxiety, and heartache that comes with being married to a country music star, because truth be told, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. Rebecca shared her own thoughts on how this song came to be.
“‘Tell em What It’s Like’ was born from Cody telling me to write a book about my experiences. We’ve found that people are curious about our story. They ask starry eyed questions wanting to know about our life and what it is like to be married to Cody – usually because they have some fantastic ideas about the glamour of it all. But “beyond the lights” there is a dark side, a lonely side, a scary side, a very unglamorous and unflattering side to being married to a musician. Like so many things in life, you can’t understand it unless you’ve lived it. The song is about living through those unflattering times and remaining proud of the love that allows you to endure.”– Rebecca Jinks
Co-writer Josh Morningstar also shared some thoughts on the song.
“This is the first song Cody and I ever sat down and actually worked on together, though I can’t take very much credit. Cody had the verses done already, he just didn’t know where to go with the chorus. The first time he played the verses for me, sitting in his office at his home, after having just met his awesome wife “Rebecca for the first time, I cried. What a beautiful, honest piece of songwriting those verses are. Cody perfectly articulates what the fans don’t see – the hardships that a relationship goes through when one person is gone the majority of the time. The chorus of the song pretty much wrote itself; I just tried to come up with a way to wrap up what he was saying in the verses. This is probably my favorite song we wrote for the record, because of how real it is. I love this song.”– Josh Morningstar
Powerful stuff.
