Cowboy country music is hot right now, and Josh Weathers is all in on the new album 'Neon Never Fades.'
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: “ 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, 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.. “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. Heat 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.”. 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.”People Are Drinking Less Than Ever. What’s Country Music to Do?Alex Pretti Helped Veterans and Owned a Gun. Why Is Country Music Silent About His Death? 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.Lindsey Buckingham on Reuniting With Stevie Nicks: 'That's Something That's in the Air'“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 careabout 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.”Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora Princess Beatrice Sparks Divorce Rumors With Husband After Dad Andrew’s Arrest: ‘He’s Been Pulling Away’ Box Office: Ryan Gosling’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ Flies High With $54.5 Million in 2nd Weekend, ‘They Will Kill You’ Flops With $5 Million
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Stephen A. Smith fires back at Josh Hart as Knicks feud intensifiesWe’re officially onto Hart vs. Smith: Round III.
Read more »
‘How I Met Your Mother’ star Josh Radnor says ‘there’s no such thing as atheism’Fox News Channel offers its audiences in-depth news reporting, along with opinion and analysis encompassing the principles of free people, free markets and diversity of thought, as an alternative to the left-of-center offerings of the news marketplace.
Read more »
Red Dead Redemption Meets Bloodborne In New Game You Can Try FreeA landscape in The Dark Cowboy
Read more »
CPAC dress code? Sequined jackets, sparkles and MAGA bling in TexasMAGA bomber jackets, sparkly cowboy hats and American flag capes dominate the fashion at CPAC.
Read more »
‘Goodbye California’ anthem sparks firestorm as country star hits back at critics: ‘Right is right’Fox News Channel offers its audiences in-depth news reporting, along with opinion and analysis encompassing the principles of free people, free markets and diversity of thought, as an alternative to the left-of-center offerings of the news marketplace.
Read more »
Josh Pate Names Historic College Football Program He's 'Worried' AboutNotre Dame enters 2026 with sky-high expectations, but Josh Pate believes complacency could be the biggest threat to a playoff return.
Read more »