Cody Canada was a little miffed when he called his old record label to get copies of his former band’s 2004 album “Soul Gravy.”
They said he’d have to pay for them.
He had written all the songs for his rock-country band Cross Canadian Ragweed; they were his.
But the label owned the master recordings.
“The more I was thinking about it, the more upset I got,” said Canada. “This is my music.”
It was around the time that Taylor Swift was in a very public dispute over the same issue.
Swift, too, owned the songs but the masters of her nine Big Machine Records studio albums belonged to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings LLC, which had bought her entire catalog in 2019.
Swift’s answer: reboot the entire discography, one record at a time, and put out “Taylor’s Version” of the albums.
If Swift could do that, why not Canada, who was a decade into his band Cody Canada and The Departed following the 2010 breakup of Cross Canadian Ragweed.
In mid-summer 2022, Canada rebooted “Soul Gravy” with his new band.
“I’m very happy with the way it turned out,” he said from home in Texas last week during a call to talk about his show Sunday, March 24, at the Maverick King of Clubs.
Canada and The Departed, which includes Cross Canadian Ragweed bass player Jeremy Plato and drummer Eric Hansen, re-recorded the album at Canada’s studio. He tapped his sons to sing on the album; the boys — Dierks is 18, Willy, 15 — have their own “pop chord” band, Waves of April, which will play a short set at Sunday’s concert.
“It felt like a homecoming thing, and it sounded better, too,” said Canada, 47. “There were a couple of tunes I thought were naturally going to be a rock-and-roll sound; the record label didn’t really like that.”
On the reboot, those songs take on an edgier rock attitude.
Canada said he took his time with the project and when it was finished, he listened to it a few times then put it on a shelf to marinate for a few months.
“I went back and listened to it after five or six months, and thought, you know what, this thing is ready to go,” he said. “I wish that we would have recorded the original like that. But if we had, maybe I wouldn’t have rebooted it with my kids involved.”
Expect to hear quite a few cuts off “Soul Gravy” 2022, as well as songs from the band’s six other studio albums when Cody Canada and The Departed take the Maverick stage, 6622 E. Tanque Verde Road. They also will play their newest single, “Elle.”
“I’m just recording stuff and saving it and when I get 10 of them, maybe I’ll probably put in on vinyl so people have something they can collect,” Canada said.
Doors for Sunday’s concert open at 6 p.m. Tucson’s own Drew Cooper, who supported The Departed when the band played The Rock in 2021, will open the show. Tickets are $15 in advance through tucsonmaverick.com, or at the door.
Tucson Landmarks: Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress St., opened in 1919 as a luxurious mainstay for visitors arriving in the Old Pueblo.
The downtown landmark has kept much of its history alive in the past century, while also bringing modern amenities to Tucson natives and tourists.
Video by Riley Brown / For the Arizona Daily Star
