Album Review – Cody Jinks – “In My Blood”

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Cody Jinks doesn’t need to release yet another new album to secure his legacy. That’s been long cemented. In fact, he just released a new one last year in Change The Game, and a tribute to Lefty Frizzell to boot. But as Jinks sings about on the title track of this new one, he continues to write songs, record albums, and take his music on the road because it’s in his blood. He knows no different, and wouldn’t have it any other way. Good or bad, beloved or ignored, Cody Jinks was born to do this. He knows no different.

2024’s Change The Game in many ways marked the end of Cody Jinks 1.0, and the beginning of the second chapter of his career. Recently sober, and now with a more reflective attitude as an elder statesman with silver streaks in his signature beard, Change The Game was a time to use a clear mind to take stock. In My Blood is a continuation of this work—the second stanza in this new chapter capturing Cody Jinks touching on familiar themes, along with some unexplored ones.

His new song “The Others” is classic Cody Jinks, eulogizing all of the also-rans, oddballs, and ill fitting parts of society whose common thread is their uncommonality. As Jinks has proven throughout his career, there is a deeper camaraderie within this cohort than you will ever find with the conformity types. And when cobbled together, they comprise quite a large and mighty community.

Though Cody is rarely so vulnerable in his writing, he completely blindsides you with the sentimentality and heartbreaking story found in the song “When You Can’t Remember” about his father. Pondering his own mortality and the passing of time is a recurring theme of this album, from the opening verses of “Lonely Man,” to the sentimental moments of “When Time Didn’t Fly.” Jinks is only 44, but they’ve been 44 hard years as he reflects back, and tries to slow down the ever-increasing pace of Father Time.


A common refrain among Cody Jinks critics is that he hasn’t made a good album in his career since Adobe Sessions. It’s always an unfair comparison when you measure everything against an artist’s magnum opus, and in the case of Cody Jinks’ when that opus is Adobe Sessions. Every subsequent album from Cody has come with quality selections that chronicle a maturing artist and an evolving perspective on life. In My Blood is no different.

But there is a consistency that besets some of the tracks of In My Blood, like you’ve heard some of these songs before just in different iterations. As awesome as “The Others” is, it could be considered just another version of “Hippies and Cowboys.” Though the album’s opening notes come blaring from Austin Tripp’s steel guitar on “Better Than The Bottle,” In My Blood comes with level of musical sameness. It’s more Outlaw country than anything, but fails to express any sort of signature sound by exploring the studio space beyond Jinks recording with his road band.

Though you respect the tenacity and hustle Cody continues to exhibit, you’re fair to wonder if taking a moment to find more natural inspiration instead of relying so much on perspiration wouldn’t do him some good. But we often prescribe this for the artists who couldn’t stop even if they wanted. Like Charley Crockett and other hard working artists, it’s how they’re wired. It’s “in their blood.”

What’s also in the blood of Cody Jinks is a dogged persistence to do things his way, not cater music to the expectations of anyone but himself, and write the songs that he wants to write, that express the things that are weighing on his heart, whether that appeals to a wide audience, the leering press, or anyone else’s personal agenda. While other top level names in independent country continue to present you with polarizing twists and confounding turns, the consistency of Cody Jinks is incredibly comforting.

1 3/4 Guns Up (8/10)

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