Homepage
Contact Cityzen
Cityzen Radio Playlist
Advertize With Cityzen.tv
 
 

Lyrics Born...

Citizen Cope
The Clarence Greenwood Recordings (RCA- 2004)
by Paul Wenzel

It is rare that an album crosses my desk that has everything- good songs and lyrics, catchy hooks, and a sonic hugeness normally reserved for avant-guard bands like radiohead. It is even more rare that an album could mix so many diverse and seemingly contrary elements, like smoothness and crunchiness, like intelligence and emotion, like slow head-nodding tracks designed for an evening alone with your significant other and heart-racing instrumentation that makes you want to leave your seat and move your body.

Click On Cover To Purchase From Amazon.com

The Clarence Greenwood Recordings, the sophomore release from Citizen Cope, is one of those albums. Cope, who's real name is Clarence Greenwood, takes the multiplatinum instrumental feel of Maroon 5 and mixes it with the slow silky vocal flow of an Al Green and the 3rd person narrative lyrical insights of a Bob Dylan. Most of the time, Cope sings about other people- men with guns, women losing their innocence in pickup trucks, and, sometimes, all of us as a whole- what we share, the hardships we experience, and the troubles that come with living in the modern world of ours.


Cope's Debut Album
Click to Buy From Amazon.com

One of many examples of this is in the ambivalent “Fame,” where he talks about how, even though we are all different, we all grab for something more. But, as Cope puts it, we need to be happy with what we have, with ourselves, “Talked to a man who caught the rainbow's end- he found that the pot of gold resided within,” Yeah, we all know that money can't buy us happiness, that we need to be happy with ourselves in order to be happy with anything, but sometimes, in this hectic work-a-day world of ours, we forget.

Thankfully, Citizen Cope is there to help remind us of how we're all important, and we can all be something more. If this album is any indicator, Cope will be reminding millions of us about that for a long time to come.

You Dig, You'll Dig:
The Arcade Fire-
Funeral
Iron & Wine-
Our Endless Numbered Days
Wilco-
A Ghost Is Born
Rachel Yamagata-
Happenstance

Elliot Smit-
From A Basement On The Hill
From Amazon.com