“Son’s Gonna Rise”
from the album The Clarence Greenwood Recordings
2004
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The Washington Post
Citizen Cope’s story-filled lyrics and inventive arrangements exist somewhere between folk-song tradition, the hippest hip-hop, classic soul and modern rock. The eclectic Cope doesn’t see much difference between the Memphis soul of Al Green and outlaw country of Willie Nelson. It’s all good.
“You put your emotion into it and you connect,” the constantly touring Cope said earlier this summer as he prepared to catch a plane from New York to Pittsburgh.
“People are gonna connect regardless of what format you use, whether it be classical, jazz, the blues, pop music, hip-hop. Whatever form you use as your vehicle is almost irrelevant. Great music has that heart and soul in it.”
Cope’s latest CD, The Clarence Greenwood Recordings, is a masterwork of synthesis. He’s the sole writer and producer of the record’s great grooves and melodies and evocative lyrics.
“As an artist, you hope that you can take the listener on some type of journey,” Cope said. “Sometimes it just works out, the pieces fit together well. The whole album is an entity in itself, not just one song or a series of songs, but a unit.”
As satisfying as sessions for The Clarence Greenwood Recordings were, the process wasn’t always a piece of cake.
“I put a lot of love into everything,” Cope said. “The easy part was just kind of following my first instinct, listening to that voice in my head. That made it a lot easier. But there was difficult times mixing because some songs are so layered with a lot of tracks and everything.”
A performer of Cope’s generation, be he white or black, could easily be a rapper rather than a singer. While Cope’s definitely been affected by rap and hip-hop, he’s a singer.
“There’s some kind of rhythmic cadence, but it’s more singing. I respect and understand the poetry element of hip-hop and the wordplay and all that, but I love melodies.”
Cope was born in Memphis, but raised in Washington, D.C. His Memphis roots may explain his attraction to the soul classics Al Green cut in Memphis with producer Willie Mitchell.
“That had a pretty big impact on me,” Cope said. “It just happened to be that it came out of Memphis. There’s a lot of stuff out there that was very influential on me as a listener.”
As in Green’s soul music and Woody Guthrie’s topical folk songs, lyrics are important to Cope.
“I pay a lot of respect to the lyrics of a song,” he said. “Hopefully, the lyrics take on a lot of different meanings and have some kind of impact. From folk to everything else — country, hip-hop, blues — every great form of music has some kind of storytelling. Classical, even when it’s not words, there’s a theme and story and emotion that’t felt. If you match emotion and heart with a cool lyric, hopefully, that makes a great song.”
The New York-residing Cope recorded The Clarence Greenwood Recordings at Electric Lady Studios in New York and Central East Studios in Washington, D.C. His special guests, including Carlos Santana and Me’Shell Ndegeocello, enhance Cope’s work but don’t distract from it.
“I love to get a lot of different players on the record, just to bring different tones and vibes into it.” Cope’s songs and production work remain the CD’s real stars. The songs don’t necessarily begin with lyrics.
“I’ll strum on the guitar and then the lyrics and the melody will come with the rhythm of the guitar. I mean, different songs I do different ways.”
Cope has ambition beyond making records that sell during the short time after their release. During the making of The Clarence Greenwood Recordings, he said, “there was a lot of listening, a lot of allowance for the album to marinate and become something that, hopefully, will last.”