The Singles Jukebox

Not our first rodeo…

[Video][Website]
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Thomas Inskeep: Country music has a tradition of great rodeo songs, from George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning” to, uh, George Strait’s “I Can Still Make Cheyenne,” and from never-on-YouTube Garth Brooks’s “Rodeo” to Brooks & Dunn’s “Cowgirls Don’t Cry.” The last of these became a hit duet with Reba McEntire, fitting since, before she became a country star, she herself was a barrel racer. Cody Johnson, meanwhile, spent years in the rodeo riding bulls before pivoting to recording music himself, gradually becoming a regional country star in Texas; his catalog is full of rodeo songs, and he still loves it so much that he’s made a rodeo documentary. It’s called “Dear Rodeo,” which is also a song on his major-label debut album, and after it became a hit on Texas Country stations, country queen McEntire jumped on it. The pairing not only makes perfect sense but sounds great; you can honestly hear the love the both of them have for the rodeo in their vocals. (And she certainly knows how to sing harmonies.) Johnson’s got what I call a whiskey voice, smooth but with a bite at the back, and Texas Country shoulda-been Trent Willmon produced this with just the right amount of twang and steel guitar tears. Without question, this version of “Dear Rodeo” makes it into the pantheon of great country rodeo records. 
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Katherine St Asaph: It seems to me like rodeos should be more exciting than your average power-ballad slog?
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The rodeo itself is alien to me, but “Dear Rodeo” feels familiar. The conceit here is simple yet profound — the experiences that make us who we are stay with us long after we leave them — and Johnson and McEntire make the most of it. The song is a well-crafted machine of nostalgia; even the guitar solo dropped in the song’s back half feels like an earned emotional climax rather than rote musicianship.
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Alfred Soto: Corny as hell — how couldn’t it be? But from Cody Johnson’s Tim McGraw-indebted burr to Reba McEntire’s benign presence, this shrewd example of narrowcasting works at exactly the level I’d expect. Even the guitars are calculated not to offend.
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Katie Gill: I’ll give Cody Johnson this: even if we didn’t have the hokey video inserts, I’d actually believe that he’s got some feelings about rodeos. He manages to sell these feelings with a sincerity that you don’t see in most modern country music. Because sonically speaking, this is most modern country music. Reba’s presence on this song is entirely superfluous. It feels like she was added in just to help get some airplay and provide some (admittedly lovely) harmonies. There’s nothing new or innovative about this song, it’s just got subject matter that’s a breath of fresh air. And I don’t know, maybe it’s because a lot of the festivities around the rodeo where I live were canceled this year because of COVID-19 (seriously, this song hits SO DIFFERENTLY to how it would have in 2018). But I get it. The song’s nothing special, but I get it.
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Samson Savill de Jong: Here I am, assuming that this song is using Rodeo as a metaphor for a lost human love, in the way that country is wont to do, but then it turns out this is genuinely about the sport of rodeo, which both of these singers competed in before starting their music careers! I think I like it more when taken literally (even though it’s obviously written so it can be interpreted as being about generic human love). Reba McEntire adds nothing compared to the original, but that is the price of trying to get airplay. This embodies what country can do well, middle-aged people reminiscing on the past with both nostalgia and acceptance, and a bitching guitar solo at the end.
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Andrew Karpan: Reba handily steals the show, no more so than when her voice almost breaks, right before the guitar solo takes it away. In that moment, she is convinced, utterly, that the rodeo of her barrel-racing youth does not, indeed, miss her at all, an aspect fundamental to its allure, the search for a subject larger than oneself, a notion that Cody Johnson grasps at nobly but does not yet find. 
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