Cody Belew is a planner, so when his newest album The Wreck is released in 2021, it will be on his terms and his timing. In the meantime, the Arkansas singer-songwriter is giving fans a taste of his music, one song at a time. The record was recorded in south Louisiana in 2018, but he had seen previous independent projects “die on the vine because there was no support behind them.”
“I was so proud of The Wreck,” he said, “that I refused to release it almost out of bitterness. I decide I was not going to give people the opportunity to ignore it. I was going to keep it to myself until I felt the moment had come.”
But 2020 has brought some good signs that Belew’s moment has arrived. He put out the single “Crimes” early in 2019. Then by a stroke of luck, when he was bartending at Emmy Squared in the Gulch, a lone customer who came in for a burger before his flight back to LA struck up a conversation. When he kept asking questions and learned Cody was a singer-songwriter, he gave him his card and asked him to send him some music.
“Turns out he was a music supervisor, and in seven days he had a placement on the show Roswell, New Mexico on CW for my song ‘The Choice a Lonely Heart Makes’ on the record that I never intended to be a single,” said Belew. “That’s why I released ‘Crimes,’ a song I wanted to release as a single.”
Another big development came when Belew was signed by One Vision Music Group in July of this year. The deal came right before his thirty-fifth birthday, a deadline he had set for himself to make something happen at a country music artist. And Cody Belew doesn’t believe in coincidences.
For this holiday season, he has another unexpected release. He followed up with a fan’s comment on social media, who ended up being a writer/producer/director in LA, and he was given the opportunity to write a Christmas song for an upcoming Paramount film Dashing in December. Charged, he says, with writing a song that was a cross between “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and “Any Man of Mine” by Shania Twain, he sat down and wrote “Hang Your Hat on My Christmas Tree.”
Belew’s current success comes after plenty of disappointments. He reached a juncture about five years ago, growing discouraged after his attempts to put together a trio kept failing—”trying to hide myself, to fold myself into a group.” He describes an epiphany in his kitchen when time stood still—like the love at first sight epiphany in the movie Big Fish–and he heard the voice of God telling him, “I gave that to you—that struggle—because I wanted you to have it, and I put you in the place where I put you and made you a country singer because I needed you to carry that mantle and get it as far as you can get it. If you’re afraid of doing it for your own hang- ups, somebody braver than you is going to come along, and you’re never going to forgive yourself because you’re afraid.”
Almost as soon the experience ended, he heard Marty Stuart being interviewed by Dan Rather and talking about how country music used to welcome every walk of life and celebrate differences.
Belew said he thought at the time, “I can’t unknow what I just heard from God and Marty Stuart, so I decided to stop my pity party of fear and get back into country music. Since that time, some of the steps are big and some are small, but I’m participating and showing up.”
Coming to Nashville was always in the plans for Cody Belew. He has early memories of someone standing him up on a chair in the one-room rock church in Antioch, Arkansas, where he sang “This Little Light of Mine” as an ancient woman accompanied on the piano. In the small community where he grew up, everyone just assumed he would be a singer.
“In school, when they asked, ‘What do you want to be?’ they’d skip over me. ‘Oh, he’s going to be a singer.’ Nashville was always the pilgrimage for me because that’s where you go if you’re a country singer, if your whole world is country music,” said Belew.
When he was a ninth grader, his whole family took a trip to Nashville, their first plane ride, using his grandmother’s air miles. He had a meeting with a VP at MCA records with Arkansas connections who said he felt Cody had promise but wasn’t going to sign “a kid singer.” He suggested Belew consider Belmont and asked for first dibs when he got back to town. Timing worked out differently and he ended up graduating from Arkansas Tech University, attending on a full academic scholarship and music scholarship. Then he headed to Nashville for good.
After a less than pleasant experience auditioning for American Idol, in 2012, Belew was contacted by The Voice, after seeing his music on YouTube. They assured him he could audition in Nashville. He arrived prepared to sing Lady GaGa’s “You and I,” Gary Clark Jr.’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” and a CeeLo Green song. In his first meeting with the show’s head of casting, things just clicked. He ended up on CeeLo’s team—his goal upon auditioning—and went on to make the top ten. On the show, he says he refused to play into the classic sob story the show’s producers love.
“I told them up front I wasn’t interested in that. I didn’t have a death in the family. I had all my legs and arms. I just wasn’t going that route, so the story line for me in their minds was very short. They kept picking songs that were so far out of my comfort zone.”
When he got to choose his own songs, he says he had figured out that his plan to “pave a path down the middle of Music Row” wasn’t going to happen. He decided he couldn’t go back to Nashville to do country music “because they’re not going to let me in, so what other options do I have while I have this opportunity?” He realized he had a big enough voice and a big enough personality to go the route of Elton, George Michael, Bowie, or Mick Jagger. “I can do that easily so that’s what I leaned into.”
Now that big voice and big personality have brought Cody Belew some big opportunities.
“Leading up to the middle of this spring, I was really preparing myself to say goodbye. I gave myself that much of a runway because I knew it was going to break my heart, but I was ready. I didn’t have a plan for 2020.”
When he got the opportunity to sign with the label, he says, they wanted him to get into the studio and record some music they could put on social media. When Anastasia Brown at the label suggested trying Dwight Yoakam’s “Thousand Miles to Nowhere,” he knew the song but never would have thought of recording it.
Belew says, “As soon as she said it, I knew instantly how I wanted to treat it, how I wanted to slow it down. I knew that we could tap into it in a new way that spoke to this isolation of COVID with people working from home and not being around each other.”
He recorded the song in Ronnie Millsap’s studio, Ronnie’s place, formerly Roy Orbison’s studio. “As soon we go the first take in the studio with the musicians, I came out of the booth and said, ‘I know that ya’ll had a plan to start releasing singles from The Wreck, but I’d like to push all that back. I think this song could be a great introduction to that album,’ so we released it.”
Now Belew is looking toward 2021, when he says he and the label are planning the timing for The Wreck, releasing singles with radio support while alternating with digital singles and perhaps a behind-the scenes video. “Month to month,” he says, “we have a whole calendar for the year with that one album,” he says. The album, inspired by personal heartbreak, speaks to a common experience of loss.
“I wrote some of the songs trying to save my marriage, and I wrote the rest of them letting it go because I didn’t know what else to do,” he says. “I wish people could experience that journey and know that when you write a song, you don’t know if it’s ever going to make it to tape, but you write it, you live it. Then you get to record it with amazing musicians. They bring your vision to life sonically and you release something to the world that you are so incredibly proud of, and it doesn’t belong to you anymore.”
