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Arts & Entertainment

Citizen Cope

This critically acclaimed singer songwriter is far from average. Growing up in many different places, his music shows all that he's been through. He's lived in Greenville, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; Vernon, Texas; Austin, Texas; Washington, DC; and Brooklyn, New York and growing up wasn't easy for him. He definitely shows it off in his music with his southern urban romantic flare. In the past nine years, he's produced four albums, all with their own different kind of sound showing off his diversity. His music is said to be a mixture between hip hop, soul and blues, and folk. It took awhile for him to figure out his sound. He found it by playing at several local venues and once it was found, it was definitely showed off on his debut self-titled album in 2002. His world of musical worry isn't completely shown off until his second album. The “Contact” Cope has been searching for is found, but it isn’t easily maintained. The effort to maintain contact keeps us moving into the heart of the mystery, the strangeness of the stories, the lull of the sound.With The Clarence Greenwood Recordings, the sound is stripped of any excess. At the same time, the sound is as big as it needs to be—injected with an urgency that, in the words of the most celebrated song from the album, examines the world “Sideways.” “Sideways” caught the attention of Carlos Santana who covered it and asked Cope to perform with him during a European tour.
Greenwood is the first of the fully mature Cope statements where, by attaining control in the studio, he can riff on the uncontrollable universe in which we live. The opening line of the opening song—“things have been getting heavy these days”—sets the scene. Cope finds his groove that, with only slight variations, will fuel his tales of seeking hope in hell. The groove becomes a mantra and the mantra, sung in a voice that is both disarmingly sincere and studiously ironic, stops us in our tracks. Cope tracks the relationship between terror, fantasy and reality. Cope is a one man band, and is definitely one for the books.

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