Cody Cannon sits outside his workshop in Palestine, Texas, talking down the line from a phone propped on his porch. Behind him lies the flat expanse of East Texas, where hunting, fishing and small-town family life have shaped his every move. He holds a jug at his side. He is polite, measured, even friendly, but sparing with his words. You sense he would much rather be working on his Toad Thumper fishing lure business or tackling a job around the house than explaining himself to the music press.
We hooked up to talk about the new Whiskey Myers album, Whomp Whack Thunder, on which all 11 songs bear a single songwriting credit – in Cannon’s name. The singer is quick to insist that this is not some new grand strategy.
“Man, you know, John [Jeffers, guitar] writes, and Cody [Tate, guitar] writes,” he says. “And we all get together and we have a lot of songs. And it just kind of worked out that way. It wasn’t a plan or anything. It’s just how it happened. No matter whose song it is, we always work together as a band. We’re very democratic when it comes to the music and the art. If we have a disagreement, we always will play it each person’s way. It’s never dismissive. As far as the artistic vision is concerned, it’s been real easy, man. We all kind of dig pretty much the same stuff. And it just works.”
Although thrust into the spotlight, he seems a reluctant spokesman and you get the impression that a Cody Cannon solo album is an unlikely prospect. What has emerged instead is Whiskey Myers’ most ambitious record yet – rich with layered guitars, Southern swagger, country-boy honesty and rock’n’roll conceits. The band performance is everything, and Cannon shrugs off talk of songwriting craft. “I try not to think too much and just channel it,” he says.
Whomp Whack Thunder opens with urgency. Time Bomb sets the pace, taut and hard-edged, its lyric about ‘waiting around to explode’ tailor-made for the stage. But the album quickly broadens into more nuanced, ambitious terrain. Somewhere near the core lies Rock ’n’ Roll, one of the record’s defining moments. Over a slow, ritualistic groove, Cannon intones: ‘I am the light that guides you whenever you’re alone, I’m that pounding in your bones… /I am the Rolling Stones.’ It lands less like a boast than a meditation on what it means to carry the spirit of this proud but ageing genre in 2025.
“It’s from the perspective of rock’n’roll itself,” he explains. “You’re imagining what rock’n’roll would say if it was a person.”
The effect is humbling – an idea that’s bigger than the band, bigger than all of us.
The Stones loom large in Cannon’s imagination. When Whiskey Myers opened for them at Soldier Field in Chicago in 2019, it was less a career milestone than a personal benediction.
“They’re one of our favourite bands of all time,” he says. “We all look up to them.”
Then comes Born To Do, one of the album’s most heartfelt statements. Stripped back and acoustic, it plays like a confessional, a middle-years band staring down its own purpose. But it also casts rock’n’roll as a semi-divine calling – not a job or a hustle, but something you were put on this Earth to carry out. ‘I’ve had some good friends with me, and they’ve helped me make it through/They said we were doing what we were born to do.’
The roots of Whiskey Myers run deep in East Texas soil. The original members of the band, which began in 2007, grew up together since they were kids. Cannon was raised in Neches, a tiny unincorporated community (population 219 in 2025), where his parents worked on the grounds of a nearby prison, and the rhythms of small-town life left a lasting mark.
“I had a lot of jobs when I was younger,” he recalls. “Worked construction, did a bit in the oilfield, cut grass… whatever came along. I was good for anything. The only thing I was useless at was waiting tables.” He pauses, grinning ruefully at the memory of this failure.
The other members of the band – guitarists John Jeffers and Cody Tate, bassist Jamey Gleaves, drummer Jeff Hogg and multi-instrumentalist Tony Kent – come from similarly modest, Southern-man surroundings, scattered across Palestine, Elkhart and Slocum. It is a world far removed from the music meccas of Nashville, New York or Los Angeles, and it shapes everything about Whiskey Myers’ sound.
“We were all blue-collar, and it shows in our music,” Cannon says, with a meaningful look. He leans across and spits tobacco juice copiously into the jug at his side. The band may have long since traded day jobs for rock’n’roll stardom, but the blue-collar mentality is still written into every note they play. Their audience, he adds, come from that same background – hard-working, family-centred, rooted in the values the band grew up with.
Comparisons with Lynyrd Skynyrd come easily: a group of friends turned brothers, playing like their lives depend on it. ZZ Top are another touchstone, fellow Texans who did things on their own terms until the world came to them. The Stones, meanwhile, hover as a spiritual reference point, swaggering proof that a band can endure for decades without losing its grip on the primal spark.
Whiskey Myers’ lack of pretension may give the impression of a working band still dragging their amps down dirt highways, but in truth they are now a Big Deal in America: after more than 2,500 live shows, they’ve filled arenas and built a following that packs marquee venues coast to coast.
The band’s 2023 tour was 23 dates, with Rival Sons among several support acts, including a show at the James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia (capacity 9,000). Cannon, however, brushes off any talk of the band’s continuing elevation in the scheme of things. “I don’t really think about status,” he says, in a tone that does not invite further discussion. “We just do what we do.”
That credo takes different forms on Whomp Whack Thunder, and nowhere more powerfully than Rowdy Days. ‘Yeah, it’s true I’ve lived a life most people would dream about/But there’s been so many times I’ve tried to burn it all down,’ Cannon sings. It is a time-of-life confessional, looking squarely at the temptations, the damage, and the redemption that follow in the wake of a rock’n’roll lifestyle.
‘They say I’m getting old,’ he says in the lyric, before turning the song into a statement of survival, gratitude and release: ‘For once I’m finally free, my hands no longer shake, and my mind is at ease.’ When asked if he feels “old” or, indeed, even middle-aged, Cannon bristles. “I’m in my prime,” he shoots back. And Rowdy Days backs him up. Set to a sweet, slow-burning slide guitar, it feels like an anthem for the times – a song that could prove huge for the band.
For all their grit and swagger, Whiskey Myers are not a band lost in excess. Cannon, now a father of three, writes with the responsibilities of home life pressed into his songs. If Rowdy Days is his reckoning with the past, then Monsters is his reassurance for the future – a ballad born of late nights, sleepless children and the ordinary trials that rarely make it into the mythology of rock’n’roll. ‘Don’t worry about the monsters,’ he sings softly, ‘they can’t get to you.’
It is the simplest of comforts, but in Cannon’s voice it carries the weight of a man determined to protect his family while admitting that shadows always lurk at the edges. “To my kids I’m just dad with the guitar,” he says, smiling benignly.
Cannon is a perfectly formed paradox: the reluctant rock’n’roll frontman who can turn the most private corner of his family life into a universal anthem. Where a younger songwriter might have leaned into escapism, Cannon digs into the reality of being present – husband, father, provider – and sets it to melody. It is a different kind of rock-star heroism, quieter but no less compelling.
“I try not to overthink it,” he says with a shrug. “It’s just life, man. You put your head down and keep going.”
When asked what draws him outdoors – to the lake, to hunting, to the quiet – his tone softens.
“It clears my head,” he says. “It’s peaceful. You can think straight out there. Everything slows down. I guess it’s always been like that for me.” He shrugs, as though the answer should be self-evident.
In an industry addicted to constant exposure, Whiskey Myers remain outliers. They still release their music on their own label, Wiggy Thump Records, with distribution through Nashville-based Thirty Tigers. They rarely indulge in promo, yet they can fill arenas. Cannon embodies that ethos. He is certainly no salesman. He doesn’t gush about inspiration or ambition. He spits again into his jug, shrugs at the questions, and lets the songs do the talking.
Whiskey Myers’ ascent has been achieved almost entirely outside the usual machinery of the music business. One of the biggest boosts came not from radio or glossy profiles, but from television. Their songs have featured heavily in Yellowstone, the Kevin Costner ranch saga, which helped catapult them to a far wider audience. Other syncs have followed, feeding the sense that their music belongs as much to the wide open spaces of America as to the stage.
“We don’t chase that stuff,” Cannon says. “If it comes along and people like the music, that’s fine. But we don’t change what we do for it. We just keep playing.”
His point is clear: the band’s connection to their fans is forged on the road, not on screen.
On the new album, that restless streak finds its voice in Ramblin’ Jones, a quirky, loping, rock-rap rumble somewhat in the style of Cage The Elephant, that finds Cannon semi-freestyling a lyric centred on a Southern colloquialism. A ‘jones’ is a craving, an itch you can’t shake. Cannon turns it into a confession. ‘After all these years, you know I still got a ramblin’ jones,’ he declares, a line that feels like a boast and a burden. For all his talk of home life and responsibility, the compulsion to keep moving, to keep playing, has never left him.
Even as we finish talking he’s already half-distracted by the night ahead. “I’ve got chores to do, and then we’re heading out to do a show in Arkansas,” he says, with the weary pragmatism of someone for whom constant travel is part of the deal. It is not boastful, nor even particularly enthusiastic, just the life he’s chosen and continues to live.
In 2025, Whiskey Myers stand as one of the USA’s biggest independent rock acts, while sounding and carrying themselves like the same East Texas boys who used to haul amps into honky-tonks. Cody Cannon may be the reluctant spokesman, but his songs speak volumes: about work, family, resilience, temptation, survival, and about a band who, after 18 years together, still have one hell of a ramblin’ jones.
Whomp Whack Thunder is out now via Wiggy Thump Records.
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