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\n\tFor the past decade, Josh Weathers<\/a> has been hearing the same refrain from his wife. Kady Weathers has been watching the chickens scratch and the horses run around their north Texas home and pondering her husband\u2019s high-school rodeo past, and reaching the same conclusion: \u201cCody Johnson<\/a> can\u2019t be the only<\/em> cowboy putting out country music<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tEventually Weathers either came around, or simply figured that Johnson, a fellow Texan, could use the company. At the beginning of the year, Weathers released Neon Never Fades<\/em>, a twanging, two-stepping, fiddle-laden collection of 11 hard country tracks to mark his first studio album since 2019, and the first in his discography that leans all the way into his cowboy roots.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt\u2019s been a long time since I put out a full-length record,\u201d Weathers tells Rolling Stone<\/em>. \u201cI think people probably anticipated me putting out a straight-ahead country record for a while. Everything I\u2019ve ever done has had sort of the country, heartland-rock spin to it, but this was steel guitar and fiddle. We just tried to take a dart and put it right in the middle of that.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe release capped a bellwether year for Weathers. His musical career dates to the mid-2000s, but 2025 was the first in which Weathers seemed to summit the Texas Music mountain. He raised more than $430,000 for Hill Country flood relief<\/a> last July, all via a hastily-arranged social media livestream. In November, he took home entertainer of the year<\/a> at the annual Texas Country Music Awards \u2014\u00a0an award he calls \u201cthe greatest honor\u201d of his career \u2014 in a category that also featured Braxton Keith and Jake Worthington as nominees.<\/p>\n \n\tAll the while, he found his music gaining traction on social media, enough so that \u2014 despite not releasing a studio album since 2019 \u2014\u00a0he landed a deal with Sea Gayle Music, the longtime Nashville publishing house founded by songwriter and producer Chris DuBois. DuBois, in turn, introduced Weathers to a cadre of Music City songwriters.<\/p>\n