Josh Weathers Is Making Cowboy Country Like Cody Johnson

For the past decade, Josh Weathers has been hearing the same refrain from his wife. Kady Weathers has been watching the chickens scratch and the horses run around their north Texas home and pondering her husband’s high-school rodeo past, and reaching the same conclusion: “Cody Johnson can’t be the only cowboy putting out country music.”

Eventually Weathers either came around, or simply figured that Johnson, a fellow Texan, could use the company. At the beginning of the year, Weathers released Neon Never Fades, a twanging, two-stepping, fiddle-laden collection of 11 hard country tracks to mark his first studio album since 2019, and the first in his discography that leans all the way into his cowboy roots.

“It’s been a long time since I put out a full-length record,” Weathers tells Rolling Stone. “I think people probably anticipated me putting out a straight-ahead country record for a while. Everything I’ve ever done has had sort of the country, heartland-rock spin to it, but this was steel guitar and fiddle. We just tried to take a dart and put it right in the middle of that.”

The release capped a bellwether year for Weathers. His musical career dates to the mid-2000s, but 2025 was the first in which Weathers seemed to summit the Texas Music mountain. He raised more than $430,000 for Hill Country flood relief last July, all via a hastily-arranged social media livestream. In November, he took home entertainer of the year at the annual Texas Country Music Awards — an award he calls “the greatest honor” of his career — in a category that also featured Braxton Keith and Jake Worthington as nominees.

All the while, he found his music gaining traction on social media, enough so that — despite not releasing a studio album since 2019 — he landed a deal with Sea Gayle Music, the longtime Nashville publishing house founded by songwriter and producer Chris DuBois. DuBois, in turn, introduced Weathers to a cadre of Music City songwriters.

“I started taking trips up there every month,” Weathers says. “They even asked me, ‘Do you want to move to Nashville?’ and I said, ‘No. I’m gonna stay in Texas.’ If George Strait didn’t have to move to Nashville, then I don’t have to move to Nashville.”

His Nashville collaborations resulted in Neon Never Fades. Weathers co-wrote seven songs on the album. Two others are Chris Stapleton collaborations, and songwriters like DuBois, Barrett Baber, and Bobby Pinson are featured often.

One song in particular, “Who’s Hanging the Moon?” has already bolstered Weathers’ conviction that he’s doing just fine in the Lone Star State. The collaboration with DuBois, Baber, and Cam Newby was the most-played Texas country song of 2025 according to the Texas Regional Radio Report charts. It’s a fresh take on honky-tonk, heavy on steel guitar and Weathers’ drawl as he sings, “Who’s making the stars do what they do if you’re here in my arms?”

To Weathers, the record serves to provide fodder for the type of high-energy, all-in live show that landed him Texas entertainer of the year honors in the first place. Entertainment influences, he says, were as big as singers and songwriters in shaping him as an artist. Specifically, he says, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley and Prince showed the sort of command of both the audience and the stage that he’s been trying to capture.

“I saw Prince when I was 19, and it changed my life. I’ve never seen anybody do that to this day. And I saw him in a club with probably 250 people in it, at like 2:30 in the morning in Dallas,” he says. “The most unbelievable entertainer I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Weathers is currently touring heavy in Texas, with an April date at Gruene Hall highlighting a run of Lone Star State dance halls and bars. He also played the Austin rodeo in March, plus made a festival stop at the Fort Worth Music Festival. He’ll sail on the annual Rock the Coast Texas music cruise in April, and venture to Pendleton, Oregon, in early summer for the annual Jackalope Jamboree, playing on a June 25 bill with Kaitlin Butts.

Even as a run of constant touring looms, and with the Texas entertainer of the year award still fresh in his mind, Weathers says he has just started scratching the surface of his onstage potential.

“If you really want to be able to smoke people, you need to play weddings,” he says. “You need to go learn how to entertain people who do not care anything about seeing you. That, to me, is a lost art. When you see someone who’s an actual entertainer and knows how to grab an audience. That’s what I want to master.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.