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Will the Real Citizen Cope Please Stand Up?

Photo by Alex Elena

“There was a great excitement when I got my first deal at Capitol—like my life had changed,” Cope says of the 1997 signing. “I had been struggling—trying to become a songwriter—selling tickets and now, I could go make a record, get a big advance, walk into a bank with 75Gs and say, ‘Open an account.’ That shit was big. Then, later that year when the IRS took half of it, I was like, ‘Oh shit! Now, I’m broke again.’” He chuckles good-naturedly. Soon he discovered that there wouldn’t be any more money coming from the record, either.

He found himself in a tug-of-war with “this record company figure that was supposed to be like some Don Corleone guy.” He was asked to rerecord the same songs multiple times while the label looked for radio- and TV-friendly singles on an album that Cope intended to be “about underground themes.” Eventually, the project was shelved.

“I couldn’t believe they would spend that much money on a record and then, not put it out,” he says, matter-of-factly with just a hint of frustration. “There were some mistakes I made on that record. I think my original demos were the most powerful. I probably should have stuck with those instead of rerecording them,” he admits. “I think I was just chasing after those songs.”

Without an album and bound by a rerecording restriction, Cope was back at square one. He started rehearsing in a friend’s studio, concentrating on vocalizing—pushing his voice.

He penned “If There’s Love” and flew to Atlanta to record it. And he convinced DreamWorks to finance recording his demo, only to have them pass on it afterward. This time, Cope kept the rights and took it to New York to try his luck. When a line of labels formed ready to sign him, DreamWorks came back and offered a contract. Grudge-free, Cope signed and his eponymous debut came out in 2002.

Now living in the Ft. Greene section of Brooklyn, N.Y., Cope was already back to writing new material, including “Sideways”—a tune that, contrary to its name, only would take him upward.

“I’d been writing it and had it in a high form of incubation and then, it just,” he pauses, “came. I remember writing the song and then getting inspired seeing some beautiful woman. It wasn’t about her, but it took it over the top. I went back and finished it, and it became really powerful.”

He went into an New York studio to record, nailing it in two takes. “I recorded it live with the drummer in the same room and Meshell [Ndegeocello] was in the control room playing the bass,” he says. “There was just something about it when the recorded version came out—people liked it.”

But the reaction from the folks at DreamWorks wasn’t what Cope had hoped for. “They were kinda lukewarm on it,” he says.

Meanwhile, Arista heard “Sideways” and passed it along to Carlos Santana’s manager. “The manager liked it, Carlos liked it, Carlos’ family really liked it,” Cope says. “It was done. I had recorded it. I talked to him and he didn’t want to change it. He didn’t want to rerecord it. He just wanted to play guitar on it.”

Fresh off of a full-day video shoot for “If There’s Love,” Cope flew out to San Francisco. He was crammed into an economy seat with a stop in Chicago. No sleep. Once he landed, he didn’t even bother going to the hotel. He headed straight to the studio for a noon session and got to work. Topping it off with some percussion, guitar and organ, plus a few engineering tweaks, the track was done; but it wasn’t until the day before Santana’s Shaman was released in 2002 that Cope knew “Sideways” had made the cut. (He would later go on to perform “Sideways” with Sheryl Crow in front of tens of thousands of music fans at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2010. Clapton would invite him to play “Hands of the Saints” with him, too.)

His path was clear. Cope bought out his contract with DreamWorks, signed with Arista and started work on a new album, The Clarence Greenwood Recordings.