Cody Canada is ready to give a festival audience a heavy dose of Cross Canadian Ragweed. He just wants to make it clear that he’ll be doing so with the Departed.
At a one-day festival called Spring Revelry, which organizers and artists confirmed to Rolling Stone will take place on May 4 in Indianola, Iowa, at the sprawling Memorial Balloon Field, Cody Canada and the Departed will perform Ragweed’s 2004 record Soul Gravy — one time the defining album of the Red Dirt genre — from front to back.
Canada’s set is part of a stacked festival lineup headlined by Turnpike Troubadours and Ryan Bingham with the Texas Gentlemen. Trampled by Turtles, Muscadine Bloodline, Josh Meloy, Kaitlin Butts, and Tyler Halverson are also on the bill. Tickets go on sale — via Ticketmaster — Wednesday at 9 a.m. Central.
Ragweed was signed to Universal South when Soul Gravy was released, and the label retains the rights to the album. Ragweed broke up in 2010. Since then, Canada and Ragweed bass player Jeremy Plato have toured as the Departed, which also features Eric Hansen on drums. In 2022, the Departed re-recorded Soul Gravy, free from label ties — think “Taylor’s Version” but for an Americana album. The release cast fresh attention on the Departed, who have since enjoyed a sustained run of sellout or near-sellout crowds at venues like Gruene Hall and Billy Bob’s Texas. The band will make its Ryman Auditorium debut on March 2 as part of a triple bill with Randy Rogers and Stoney LaRue. At the same time, calls on social media for a Ragweed reunion, Canada says, have become increasingly difficult to ignore.
“The one thing that really does bother me about it is, I just wish people could remember better than they do,” Canada tells Rolling Stone. “They’re hearing memories. And they are drunk memories, because what we do now with the Departed is better than Ragweed.
“When people hear Soul Gravy, they think of Ragweed shows. They think about how hammered they were, or that they got laid or that they made a big road trip. But what we’re doing now as a three-piece band is better. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”
Social media is not the only place where Canada finds clamoring for Ragweed. Since the pandemic, he says he has fielded eye-popping offers for a reunion. However, Ragweed — which featured Canada, Plato, drummer Randy Ragsdale and rhythm guitarist Grady Cross — ended with its members on bad terms. Canada says those differences have not been resolved.
“The offers I get for Ragweed are really hard to overlook sometimes,” Canada says. “But people don’t realize the hard feelings that are still there. It’s like asking somebody who is divorced if they’ll get remarried. The answer is ‘Fuck no,’ right? Well, what if somebody offers you three million dollars to get remarried? I’d love to be able to say yes, but I wouldn’t feel right about it. And I wish people would remember what we actually sounded like. The best nights of their lives were some of the worst performances of my life.”
Soul Gravy’s original release hit Number Five on Billboard’s country albums chart and Number 51 on the Hot 200. Two songs — “Alabama” and the Lee Ann Womack duet “Sick and Tired” — made the Billboard country songs chart.
“I knew that ‘Sick and Tired’ would do something, just because of Lee Ann,” Canada says. “One reviewer called me and her ‘barbed wire and roses’ and I never forgot that. I understood at the time that it would be at least a blip on the radar. But luckily, it was more than that. Every song on there, from front to back, I was very happy with. There wasn’t anything I wanted to change. I just didn’t know it was going to be as talked about as it has been since.”
The original record was produced by Mike McClure. The band produced the remake in-house, with Departed engineer Brian Kinzie overseeing the mixes. Womack reprised her vocals on “Sick and Tired” and Randy Rogers and Ray Wylie Hubbard also contributed to the Departed’s version.
“This was a really good mix of tunes that meant something to me,” Canada says. “Nothing felt made up, like I was just looking for 12 songs to put on a record. It was a very personal record, I think, and the redo was a lot easier than I thought. There were a handful of tunes that we already did as a band, but once we got into the studio and started attacking it, everything came back to me. I’m not gonna say it wasn’t nostalgic, because it was. It was pretty awesome to relive all of those tunes for this.”
He says he’s looking forward to playing the album in its entirety. “We don’t really release full-length records anymore, and that’s something I really miss,” Canada says. “For someone to ask us to do it now, 20 years later, is pretty awesome.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author of the 2020 book Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere and the 2023 book The Motel Cowboy Show: On the Trail of Mountain Music from Idaho to Texas, and the Side Roads in Between.
Ken Casey stuck around after the show in San Diego, California, talking to members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Some of the challenge-coin haul.
The band started as a bet. “My band has a show in three weeks,” Casey’s coworker told him in 1996. “I dare you to open for us.”John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Dropkick Murphys (from left): Casey, DaRosa, Webster, Kelly, Rheault, Brennan, and Lynch John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Casey is largely the voice of the band, but the other members back him up. “We’re so lucky he’s the mouthpiece,” says Brennan, left. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Only the Irish can take a song about death and destruction, famine, alcoholism, and raise a glass like it’s an anthem,” says Casey. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Anytime it feels like things are about to plateau for us, something gives us a little bump,” says guitarist Lynch. “It feels exciting. It feels dangerous. It feels like doing something.” John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.