Sometimes you want to throw the towel in
But you come out swinging like you just might win.
—JACK INGRAM, “Keep On Keepin’ On”
Carrie Underwood was nervous. It was 2005, and we were in New York City, where, for the first time, the Country Music Awards were to be broadcast out of the Big Apple. Carrie was to be my first interview for the CMA special I was taping for The Wolf. Fresh off her win on American Idol, we all knew she was going to be a huge star. Simon Cowell is not exactly one of country music’s biggest advocates, but from the minute she walked on that stage and auditioned for him, it was obvious. The fact that he predicted her success was a huge deal at the time. But America’s sweetheart was a simple girl. You might even call her green, and nowhere near as skilled and polished at this media game as she became after more than fifteen years of practice.
Sensing she was uncomfortable from her body language and those big, caught-in-the-headlights doe eyes of hers, I grabbed a gadget called an iDog from the desk in the recording booth. This was back in the early days of iPods and iTunes, when stuff like this was a novelty. The thing would light up, play music, and dance to its rhythm. We were having fun, laughing and playing around with this stupid robot dog when, suddenly, Carrie relaxed, the conversation started flowing, and I pressed the record button.
In those situations, when it’s clear the person I am interviewing is preoccupied, tense, or simply having an off day, I never try to force things. Instead, I use my listening skills to dial into how someone is feeling and respond accordingly. All it takes is a little awareness and empathy to shift the mood. It no longer felt like an interview, just a goofy moment as two friends sat down and got to know each other a little better.
Listening doesn’t just involve using one of your senses. You need all five to read the energy, body language, mood, and boundaries of the person you are with. To really be able to connect and build trust that can lead to an honest conversation, you have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand how they are feeling in that moment. Know what you would want to hear, and how you would like to hear it, then package your message accordingly. Whoever you are sitting or standing across from, all it takes to have a great conversation is the right mixture of empathy and humility. As a matter of fact, that should be the first rule of any interview.
I’ve gotten much better at bringing out the best in my radio and television guests over the years. But the two things I’ve always tried to do when I’m interviewing someone is make them comfortable and allow them to talk. This job is about shining the light on them, not talking about myself, unless sharing a little personal information or banter is called for as an icebreaker. When I am open and authentic with people, they usually return the favor.
I’m always prepared with my questions, but I never interrogate, and if they want to take the conversation in another direction, so be it. I am always careful not to be so busy rehearsing what I want to say in my head, or listening for the sole purpose of responding, that I fail to catch the full meaning of what’s being communicated. It’s what many call being “present.” I pay attention to what they are saying and let the mood and flow of the story guide me to places that often end up being more interesting than the Q&A I prepared for them the night before. It’s a balancing act of spontaneity and careful guidance through a loose set of talking points to make sure we stay somewhat on track and give their fans the information they want to hear.
One of my role models for this approach was Johnny Carson. I already mentioned how, growing up, if I could stay awake late enough, I’d watch his show and take in the subtle ways he made his guests shine when they took that seat next to his desk. It didn’t matter if they were the little kid a producer found for the show who could do bird impersonations, a random oddball, or the biggest celebrity of the day, like Burt Reynolds, Johnny would make them the star, speaking and asking questions for the sole purpose of getting them to say something interesting or create the perfect setup to allow them to be their witty and best selves. A case in point was Charo, a comedienne and flamenco guitarist who would go berserk, running up and down the aisles, screaming, “Cuchi, cuchi!” at the audience members.
Johnny didn’t mind that it took the attention away from him, or that it broke all the talk show rules, because he knew it made for great television. Unless it was for the sake of a self-deprecating moment to make his audience laugh, his success came from a quiet graciousness that put others in the best possible spotlight. He was a master of listening for that perfect opening to make his guest funnier, smarter, and more interesting than they ever thought they could be.
I try to emulate his kindness as an interviewer. I never ask gotcha questions, but I pride myself on getting more out of the country stars I interview than most. There is a certain rhythm to it. Through the cover of an album or tour they want to promote, taking a line from a song, or playing a word game, I can get them to spill before they even know what’s happening, and they’re happy to do it, because it comes out in a way that’s lighthearted and relevant.
It’s a subtle skill set, but it’s well worth honing even if you aren’t a media host, because listening, watching, and paying attention to the mood in the room while being open and curious about others will serve you well as you deepen your relationships with other people. Since that early interview with Carrie, we’ve become personal friends. One of the first major country artists to come out and publicly support gay marriage, Carrie was thrilled when I told her I met the love of my life while covering one of her concerts in Atlanta. And to think it all started with the simple kindness of letting her play with that dancing dog!
Keeping ears and minds open reaps some unexpected rewards because you never know who is listening. The fact that I give my guests the respect they deserve, researching their careers so that I can ask just the right questions to put them at ease and set up a humorous or thought-provoking response, has helped me build street cred in Nashville and beyond. Recently, Gayle King sent me a direct message, letting me know she was watching my show and has become a regular viewer. That was a welcome surprise that gave me goose bumps. Move over, Oprah—I’m Gayle’s new best friend!
My best interviews have taught me that good listening is about being able to receive and interpret messages with accuracy. It requires focus. Whether someone is speaking or singing to you, whether you are a passive listener or you are involved in a two-way conversation, treat what the other person has to say like a great country song. Put away the phone, cut past whatever minor distractions are going on around you, and tune out the monologue running in your head. Listen for those meaningful pauses, the tone, and the emotions behind the words. Put your focus entirely on the person speaking. Not only will you be enriched by the information coming your way, you will earn the trust and respect of the folks who matter most to you when you give them the gift of your time and attention.
Of course, staying focused on the person in front of us is even more challenging with our iPhones constantly pinging. Distractions have never been greater, with the constant onslaught of social media, Twitter and Instagram, and the neverending list of cable, satellite, and streaming channels. In my business, if you don’t make yourself worthy of your audience’s time and focus with content that’s compelling, you might as well be roping the wind.
That’s why I can’t allow myself to be as distracted as the average listener. Paying attention and being enough in the moment to see what’s going on with others helps me to twist, pivot, and adapt as each situation requires. It enables me to show up and be fully on. The better you are at hearing what others have to say, the sharper your observations will be, so that you can cut through the clutter.
In my world, there are multiple things going on in any given moment beyond social media, and no day is exactly the same. When I’m in Nashville, my day starts with what we call “prep.” I turn on the computer, blast the radio, and read through all the press releases gathered together by my producers, looking and listening out for the pop culture news of the day: pertinent country music info like the release of Thomas Rhett’s new album, or stories paying tribute to the late, great Charley Pride. This is what we call “Hot Headlines with Cody,” which we record, edit, and play several times a day.
I’m a restless guy who will always change things up just for the sake of variety. It keeps me fully engaged. Every day brings a different, joyful moment. I could be in the studio with Blake Shelton, who’s joking about my Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers (“Man, who are you going to trust in the exit row—me in my cowboy boots or some guy in clown shoes?”); or covering a festival in Indiana, drinking rum with Kenny Chesney in his traveling tiki bar; or on the road in Texas, sitting behind Miranda Lambert’s retro Airstream drinking Randaritas (Crystal Light, lemon lime soda, ice, and “good” vodka); or doing a live CMT television broadcast outside a stadium in Phoenix, trying to focus while the KNIX radio mascot, “Barrel Boy,” a fat dude wearing nothing but a beer keg with cowboy boots, dances around and does his best to distract me.
If you were to accurately list my job description, it would go on for pages, and all of the above would be just a few of my favorite things. Another one is a show called Crossroads, where, every couple of months, hot music acts get together with artists from other genres to sing each other’s songs. Recently we did this with Florida Georgia Line and the Backstreet Boys. It’s a segment that’s rich in powerful music moments.
Another one of the joys of my ever-changing job is visiting the US military bases across the country and around the world. In June 2020, we joined the American Forces Network, which beams my radio show, After MidNite, into more than one thousand bases globally, as well more than two hundred US Navy, US Coast Guard, and US Navy’s Military Sealift Command ships at sea. Just a handful of shows have the honor of being on that network. They are picky about who goes on their airwaves—only the best for our military. But even before that, we built a special relationship with our armed forces. I’ve taken our broadcasts on the road and over the bases from Arizona to Alaska, South Korea to Bahrain. We always bring music acts to perform for the enlisted men and women, and it went so well that first time, the bosses at CMT said, “Let’s do this every year!”
In 2019, during Thanksgiving week, our last in-person trip before the world changed, we joined Craig Morgan on his twelfth USO tour to Camp Humphreys, about an hour outside Seoul, South Korea. The place was huge, like a city unto itself. Craig had spent more than ten years of his life on active duty in the US Army in the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, and another six and a half years in the Army Reserves, so it was pretty cool to show up with an Army insider. We also brought along four Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders to bring some seasonal cheer. We took in some of downtown Seoul, an intensely crowded place full of markets, temples, and stores. I found it interesting to see how many people wore masks, little knowing how much masks would become such a major part of our consciousness just three months later. When we got back to the base, I did the Hot 20 Countdown, and Craig gave a concert inside the Collier Community Fitness Center, which had oceans of space that filled up fast with soldiers.
One of the best parts of the visit was meeting the commanders and active-duty men and women at the Spartan Dining Facility, the Super Hangar, and the Sentry Village USO. It was my chance to walk around with our producers and be accessible to our regular listeners in the military, people on the ground who are serving our nation. We struck up casual conversations with people, hoping we’d find a great story to share with our listeners, something that would help promote life in the armed forces. We met a young lady, a gunnery sergeant who told us her mom watched our show religiously.
“Can we FaceTime her?” I asked, ever the opportunist.
“Sure!” she answered, beaming a megawatt smile.
Although it was a bright and crisp winter’s day in Korea, it was the middle of the night back where her mother lived, but she didn’t mind, and called home while our cameras were rolling.
“You’ve got the best soldier right there!” her mom said.
This job allows me to immerse myself in those moments. I pretty much need to be switched on and completely engaged, since, as you’ve just read, there is no single typical day for a country music TV and radio host, at least not this one. Because so much is competing for my attention and can go south on a dime, I need to be able to regroup immediately, so that what the audience sees and hears is seamless.
Some of the chaos is self-induced, because I never like to sit still. I’ll mix up the playlists or the run of the show to make it exciting and new. I reinvent because I am uncomfortable with comfort. I need to be challenged, so I’m always tinkering to keep things fresh. I also like to change up my environment. I love to be out there, catching those raw and real experiences backstage and on the road with artists; before COVID-19 put our world on pause, I was racking up the air miles. When I wasn’t in the studio, I was zigzagging across the country, making sure I was at every music festival, and parachuting in at least once on every major artist’s concert tour. In the summer especially, I could spend half the month on the road because I want to bring my listeners and viewers a unique experience. By the time you read this, I pray we can all be out there again, enjoying country music as a live audience as God meant us to do.
Keith Urban once told me, “You make Ryan Seacrest look like a slacker.” I wouldn’t go that far, but I sure do love him for saying it. Like Ryan, I do my homework. When I have an interview, which is most days, my producers and I will do some research and prepare a list of questions. My team is especially good at digging up interesting factoids and helping me come up with an angle that will not only get to the album or song the artist is promoting (that’s usually why they’re there), but create a moment that I call “sticky,” something human and memorable that people will talk about, and that we can dine out on for days or even weeks. For that moment to be truly adhesive, it’s not necessary that you remember exactly what was said, but you always remember how it felt.
These nuggets can’t be forced. They are the rewards of tuning into someone’s frequency. It’s not as if I can engineer them ahead of time through my list of questions. They happen when someone starts to go down an unexpected path. Instead of rushing onto the next question, I let the conversation unfold, pausing to keep the interview subject talking or allowing them the time to think about a question and respond in a way that’s heartfelt and authentic, then gently guiding them in the right direction. Dingo, who I brought with me from The Wolf when I first joined CMT, can always tell when I’ve picked up on something in the conversation that might be juicy.
“You look like a golden retriever who’s happily wagging his tail when he suddenly hears something no one else does,” Dingo once told me—his way of paying me a compliment. “Suddenly your eyes brighten, your ears perk up, and you sit up extra straight. That’s when we know it’s going to be good.”
An example of a sticky moment includes my interview with Paula Deen in 2013 (before her N-word controversy). As a fellow southerner who loves to eat her stick-to-your-ribs dishes, we naturally hit it off. We could chat about Crock-Pot recipes for days. I knew Paula was a little out of her element during the interview because she wasn’t in the kitchen, so I asked her a random question to warm her up:
“What’s your favorite thing to cook?”
“Potatoes! Think about it. You can boil ’em, mash ’em, fry ’em, bake ’em, scallop ’em. I don’t give a crap, honey. Just give me a potato!”
That little throwaway moment got played on tons of show breaks afterward. But the real story happened after the interview, during a photo shoot, when she pinched my butt! It became a part of my schtick for months after the interview ran.
“Can you believe that Paula Deen pinched my butt?” I’d randomly ask.
Another gem was when Dog the Bounty Hunter stopped by the studio. Weirdly, I’ve been a fan of his show, which also ran on the CMT network, and set my DVR to record it for years. But what I didn’t realize was that Dog was also a fan of my show. His late wife, Beth, a sweetheart, told me how he watched the countdown every weekend, trying to guess what the top song would be.
“Who’d have thought that you, a metro hipster, would hit it off so well with a mullet-wearing guy who chases down criminals and did time in a Texas state penitentiary,” said Dingo.
Dog was likable and disarmingly humble. And it just goes to show how it doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is. Country music is the great uniter!
I pride myself on being able to get someone to reveal something about themselves that no one else can. It doesn’t have to be something huge, it just has to help listeners to relate to a celebrity as a human being. To that end, I craft questions that they aren’t likely to expect. Like the time I asked George Strait if he takes out the trash.
“I do take it out,” he told me. “It’s not like I can go up to my wife and say hey, I’ve had fifty-one hits, I’m George Strait, I don’t hafta do that.”
Or when I asked Kenny Chesney if he cried when Bubba died in the movie Forest Gump.
“Yeah, I was on a first date,” he started to tell me, then paused. “I don’t think I told anyone this before, but the fact was, she didn’t cry, so I broke up with her!”
Kenny’s done thousands of interviews over the years, so I took the fact that he shared something with me that he’d never spoken of before as a huge compliment.
Some interviews require an extra level of sensitivity. There might be something going on with a celebrity’s personal life that’s been made public, and I need to broach with them, because their fans will want to know. But, having lived with fear of exposure for most of my adult life, I understand that there is a right way and a wrong way to bring up a sensitive subject. I never go for the direct attack. I couch the question in language that’s broad enough to allow them to gracefully dodge or answer in a vague way so that we all know what they mean, but we can leave it at that. Why poke when you can gently prod and cause less discomfort?
This was the approach I took when I interviewed the Queen of Country, Reba McEntire, after she announced that she was getting divorced. I referenced the news, then talked about how many of my listeners are going through divorce, or some other huge life change, and made it more about my audience by asking, “What advice do you have to give to anybody going through an evolution in their life or relationships?”
She answered candidly, admitting that the divorce was not her idea, and it hit her hard. But then she talked about how she wanted everyone in her life to be happy, and that life was too short for another person to be miserable in a relationship.
“So I just thought it was the best thing to take my marbles and go play somewhere else, like what my daddy used to always say.”
It was a surprisingly philosophical and sticky quote that people would remember for a long time to come. It was also a healing moment because it enabled Reba to use what she was going through to help others. She added that she was getting through it by praying to God to help her put one foot in front of the other and fulfill her purpose on this earth, and surrounding herself with great girlfriends, family members, and people in her squad who loved her.
Never be afraid to lose yourself a little in the other person. Show up for them; let them see in your face that you’re completely with them in the present moment, because you’ll never get another quite like it. Of the more than 3,600 interviews I’ve done over the years, it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I loved the time I spent with NASCAR champion Dale “The Intimidator” Earnhardt Senior while I was still at The Wolf, shortly before his life came to a tragic end in February 2001, when his car crashed in the last lap of the Daytona 500. I feel blessed to have had that precious time with him. I shared my feelings with his son Dale Junior when I interviewed him just shy of his fortieth birthday for CMT. He spoke to me about how fleeting life is.
“I can’t believe where the time’s gone really—to be honest with you,” he told me. “It felt like just the other day I was twenty-six years old and just getting going and starting my career. I look back and I remember all the things that we accomplished and all the years that we were racing and the things that we went through.”
It was another human-to-human, full-circle moment in the booth where the circumstances momentarily melted away and I could lose myself in the conversation.
Again, those authentic moments are all about getting the person I am interviewing off script and out of his or her own head. One trick I occasionally use to keep things real is to drop an F-bomb off the air right at the beginning of a conversation. I’ll say something like, “What a f*&#ing awful 2020.” I’m not generally a cusser, but it’s my way of letting a bit of air out of the tire if there’s some tension in the room. I’ll also research random facts to see if I can come up with a curveball question. When we’re preparing for a show, we’ll do a wide sweep of whatever information is out there, from Facebook to Twitter to stories on the celebrity news sites, the more out of left field the better.
“Put that in the Crock-Pot and let it simmer,” I tell my team, meaning the best ideas aren’t always ready until they’ve had a chance to marinate, although Dingo once shot back: “But that’s where some of my best ideas go to die!”
Not always. One juicy morsel that floated to the top of a Jason Aldean pop-up interview was a tweet his wife made about the fact that he doesn’t like to have his bare feet touch the floor. I brought it up right at the beginning of the interview.
“I grew up with carpeting, but now we have a distressed hardwood floor, which is rough on my feet,” he told me.
“Oh yeah?”
“I could be a foot model with these things.”
I told him I was glad I wasn’t the only one who always wears socks around the house, and that I had a special pair of Crocs just for home use.
“Who doesn’t?” Jason asked, without missing a beat. “I have these UGG things you slide into. Not the boots! Don’t get carried away.”
Jason riffed on this one little tweet for a good couple of minutes while Dingo was in hysterics off camera. It was the kind of gold you don’t get when you dive straight into a question about an artist’s latest album or concert tour. I’ll do just about anything to break someone from the cycle of publicist crap they repeated in their last dozen interviews. These days, people’s images are curated within an inch of their lives, but I can’t have that. My listeners, like me, crave authenticity and connection.
But spontaneity happens easily with someone like Blake Shelton, who’s completely comfortable in his own skin and can ham it up with anyone. He once stopped me mid-sentence to say, “Hey, why do you keep staring at my hair; what’s wrong with my hair?” We’ll riff on that for a beat or two as Blake pretends to zhuzh up his ’do while everyone in the studio laughs. Or Keith Urban, who knows me so well we can play a bit on the air, like the time he “invited” me on tour with him and his wife, Nicole Kidman.
“OMG I’d love to come,” I said. “Is this an invite from you and Nicole? Really?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah,” I said, pretending to be crestfallen. “That’s what I thought!”
Or Dolly, who you have probably figured out by now is one of my favorite people to interview. One of the first times we spoke on camera, I accidently-on-purpose said “BoobTube” instead of YouTube, and Dolly just about fell off her chair laughing.
In between, as the next song plays, we edit, chop, and come up with clever teases and wraps. A twenty-minute radio interview with Darius Rucker, for example, will get broken up into two-minute segments or highlights. Later on, we repackage and create new content from the interview for social media too. Then there is the show itself, with live breaks on the air, talking and cracking jokes over the music as it fades in and out. I usually only have a few minutes to get something out of my interview subject. If it’s someone like Taylor Swift, the pressure is even greater when I am sitting face-to-face with one of the biggest stars in the world, with their publicist and record label representatives looming close, breathing down my neck. To hear that in real time, I created my “Cody Cast” podcast, to give listeners a sense of how the interview went down with no edits, totally raw. But for radio, in between the chatter, I’m rewinding and cutting the interview up, to edit out that long pause or breath, anything that detracts from the content. Under the clock I’ll whip around during a commercial break and edit as much as a couple dozen times, going down to that last half of a second and driving my producers crazy with my OCD ways. It’s nonstop. And that’s just for radio.
Television also requires multitasking, but you must never let them see you juggling. When I am live on the red carpet for an awards show, it’s like speed dating. You never know who’s going to walk up to you, and you’d better have a reserve of smart, sassy questions to ask them in the thirty seconds or less before they move onto the step and repeat for their moment with the paparazzi. Any number of things can go wrong in that less controlled setting, but if I am at all distracted, I can never let it show on my face, because the viewers will know. I keep the smile on my face, and never let them see me sweat.
What keeps me on point is remembering what my listeners and viewers want to hear. As a professional listener, I ask the questions I know they want the answers to. After many years of doing this job, I also instinctively know when to move onto the next subject. My audience is busy. They are bombarded with information coming at them from many different sources, so it’s on me to keep them engaged and entertained so that they never turn the channel.
That’s the other secret to becoming a great broadcaster: stepping outside of yourself enough to recognize that the mere sound of your voice alone won’t cut it for your audience. I can empathize, because I share their low-boredom threshold. Who has time to listen to some long-winded blowhard? As a radio and television personality, you have to bring them substance wrapped up in a neat and sexy package of quick hits.
People need juicy sound bites to sink their teeth into, fun infotainment that will help them get through the monotony of their rush-hour commute or help them unwind at the end of a long, hard day. I want to bring my listeners and viewers something they can enjoy or learn from, so that they can shake off the blues and feel good.
It’s about them, not me.
by Dingo, Cody’s longtime producer
WHEN CODY CALLED AND ASKED me to join him at CMT, I blurted out “Yes!” before he had a chance to finish his sentence.
“Wait, don’t you want to know how much you’ll be paid?” he asked.
I didn’t care. The chance to work with Cody Alan and Brian Philips, the two best guys in the industry, was all I needed to hear. I’d left radio after The Wolf never thinking I’d go back to it. But here was my chance to have that career lightning in a bottle again. Most of us don’t get to have that once in our lifetimes, much less twice.
Cody and I were given a blank canvas and all the resources we could ask for at CMT. We got to design everything from the studio to the automation. We wrote every production piece, every music bit transition, every phrase between a song. We cranked up our creative juices to describe what each show was about and say something witty or meaningful about whatever big-name star was going to turn up for an interview each night. We got to conceptualize every aspect of what we put out to our listening and viewing audiences.
For a couple of radio nerds, it was heaven, enabling the kind of creativity and quality that I am not so sure would happen today. We were coasting on the adrenaline rush of great collaboration. Cody was the visionary. I would write something for him, and he would take it a whole host of different ways and make it better. He always strove for perfection, the proof of which are the dents in my forehead from banging it on my desk at times!
I always knew Cody was going to be a big star, and I wanted to be a part of it. The Wolf could have been a Top 40 station, it was so personality driven, smart, and well written, and Cody was the leader of the pack. He had the ability to hear things before other people did, with the kind of golden ears that would have made him a genius A&R guy at a top record label.
But that skill translates perfectly into what he does today. Even though he’ll prepare dozens of questions in advance of an interview, he has the ability to hear something in the artist’s words and tone, know it is significant, then pivot quickly to pick up the thread and gently coax them into revealing something about themselves that fascinates our listeners. He does this in a way that’s disarmingly humble. All this helps built equity in the show. Artists know they are going to get thoughtful, quality questions. They also have a comfort level with Cody from their conversations on radio that translates well to television. They don’t have to be as guarded on camera because they know he’s never going to abuse their trust.
Yet Cody doubts himself more than he should. When he was first asked to take over the CMT Hot 20 Countdown—CMT’s flagship and The Tonight Show of countdown television—he kept hemming and hawing about the decision, wondering if he was meant for TV.
“Are you kidding me?” I told him. “This is a no-brainer!”
Cody is the equivalent of that rare five-tool baseball player—he’s part of a small and elite group of broadcasters who can do it all.