On August 30th Cody Canada and The Departed will drop their new single “Mexican Sky” across all streaming platforms, an original song that until now has only been recorded live and featured on Ragweed’s 2001 Live At Billy Bob’s album.
The song was recorded at their own 36 B studio and is produced by Canada himself along with longtime engineer Brian Kinzie. “Mexican Sky” also features Elysha LeMaster who shares vocals with Canada and also created the single’s artwork. LeMaster is the lead singer of Waves in April, a rock band that formed at Cody and wife Shannon Canada’s School of Rock in New Braunfels, Texas.
“I am making the best music of my life. I have half written songs from over the last 14 years that I never have had time to finish. Now I can dedicate my attention to one song at a time.” explains Canada.
It’s been over a quarter century since Cody Canada kicked off his music career. A road warrior and prolific songwriter, Canada was the frontman of Cross Canadian Ragweed, a wildly influential band that commanded the Red Dirt scene for more than a decade selling millions of albums while also dominating the live music circuit nationwide until their split in 2010.
Since 2011, Canada and his band The Departed have carried on in that gritty and lyrically provocative style releasing 6 studio albums, several of those hitting 3 different Billboard charts. After the release of their last full length album Soul Gravy in 2022, Canada noticed the turning tide of the music business, going from a full album market to a singles game, and that is just fine with him.
Since 2020, The Departed have released 5 standalone singles. Their previous single “Elle” hit the Top 10 on the CDX chart, a song Canada wrote about a young songwriting protege who struggled after a breakup to put the pieces of her heart back together. The next single to follow “Mexican Sky” is “Levelland,” a song written by the great James McMurtry. In this day and age of the “ruling single” Canada will continue to stitch his brightest and finest tunes into the modern music fabric, but his old school heart will never fall completely out of love with the magic of the album, so a full recording is not completely off the table. With live performance being the truest way to capture a band’s essence, The Departed hints at the possibility of a live album in the not-too-distant future.
“After the first era of The Departed, I have now come back to myself; to wallow in my evolution as a songwriter. I have never had the luxury of time to calibrate songs that have been on the back burner. Now that I spend more time off the road, songwriting has become the focus again and I feel very inspired. I often think about Rodney Crowell releasing Fate’s Right Hand when he was in his 40’s.”