An Intimate Solo/Acoustic Performance by Citizen Cope with Special Guest Victoria Reed

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Hartford

DETAILS

Sun, April 03, 2016
Hartford, CT
Show: 7:30 PM

Ticket INFO


Member Presale: 2/10/16 06 AM
Public Onsale: 2/11/16 06:01 AM

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GENRE

Pop / Rock / Soul
An Intimate Solo/Acoustic Performance by Citizen Cope with Special Guest Victoria Reed

The world only has one singer-songwriter like Clarence Greenwood a.k.a. Citizen Cope.  On this one special evening, you’ll have the chance to get up close and personal with the festival headliner and experience his special blend of folk, blues, soul & hip-hop. To make this evening even more soulful, $1 of every ticket purchased will go to purchasing musical instruments for students at Red Lake Middle School in Red Lake, MN. Red Lake is part of Turnaround Arts, a Program of Presidents Obama’s President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities that is using arts education to help students succeed. For more info, visit http://turnaroundarts.pcah.gov/

Citizen Cope

Connect with this artist:

www.citizencope.com

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Artist Bio

While ‘Heroin & Helicopters’ feels particularly timely, the record’s themes have been fixtures of Cope’s music since the release of his self titled debut in 2002. That album was the culmination of years of pursuing his passion. Cope got his musical start in DC before moving to Brooklyn, where he wrote songs while supporting himself on the streets, buying and selling concert and sporting tickets with a cast of characters outside arenas and stadiums. His music spread from fan to fan via word of mouth, and over the course of time his songs have become the soundtrack of his fans lives.

The success of Cope’s music has always been a slow burn, rather than a flash in the pan. His single “Let The Drummer Kick” eventually went Platinum without any support from commercial radio. The Washington Post has hailed him as “DC’s finest export since Marvin Gaye,” while Rolling Stone raved that his “uncommon chords and harmonies combine delicate dissonance with unexpected flashes of beauty.” In 2004, Cope followed up his self titled debut with ‘The Clarence Greenwood Recordings,’ an album Vibe praised as “flawless throughout,” gushing that Cope “makes music that feeds your soul…this is one of those CDs you hear at a friend’s house and rush out to buy.” The collection was largely ignored by mainstream media and never charted, yet the grassroots swell of support kept sales rolling year after year, to the tune of 700,000 copies, and opened the doors to film and television syncs with tracks appearing in Entourage, Sons of Anarchy, Alpha Dog, and more. Songs from the record would go on to be covered by everyone from Carlos Santana and Sheryl Crow to Richie Havens and Rhymefest, and in the years that followed, Cope has headlined all 50 states and shared stages with superstars like Eric Clapton. He cracked the Billboard 200 for the first time with 2006’s ‘Every Waking Moment,’ and then launched his own label to release 2010’s ‘The Rainwater LP’ and 2012’s ‘One Lovely Day,’ his highest charting album to date.

As Cope’s career grew, his style of urban folk never settled into any particular genre in an industry fixated on arbitrary distinctions like radio formats. “I can understand why it didn’t go into the cookie cutter. The music and my life were influenced by growing up in very distinct but different American cultures.” Born in Memphis, spending summer months with his great aunt and uncle in a small west Texas town, while being primarily raised in Washington, DC, Cope grew up equally influenced by the production techniques of George Martin, Dr. Dre and Willie Mitchell while listening to everything from Willie Nelson, to John Lennon, Bob Marley, Outkast and A Tribe Called Quest. Artistic boundaries meant nothing.

The 2011 birth of his daughter proved to be an ideal moment to step away from it all and reevaluate what mattered most, both as a songwriter and a man. “It was really important for me to be there with my daughter as she grew up,” says Cope. “I took these past several years off of recording mostly just to spend time with her. People say it’s not rocket science making records, but there really is a science to making a piece of art that’s going to touch people emotionally and have an impact on their lives, and if you’re not feeling it, you can’t fake it.”

Cope’s time away from music was also a moment to deal with reflecting and addressing the turmoil he faced surrounding the death of his estranged biological father, who had been physically abusive before abandoning his responsibilities decades earlier. “He was sick and I was able to have a sit down with him before he died,” Cope told Lance Armstrong in a poignant conversation for The Forward Podcast. “I had a lot of fear surrounding my father, and when I saw him, I realized I wasn’t scared of him as a person. He was just a flawed individual and I saw him in a whole different light. I didn’t want to go through life having this anger or hatred, and I don’t even know what forgiveness is in that realm, but maybe it’s a little bit of forgiving yourself and giving love to yourself.”

That kind of self reflection is at the heart of ‘Heroin & Helicopters,’ which actually draws its title from a warning Santana shared with Cope one night backstage at The Fillmore. “Stay away from the two H’s, Heroin and Helicopters” he said, because they all too often prove fatal for musicians and celebrities. The message resonated with Cope, who saw parallels with a broader culture fixated on shortcuts over self improvement, on mass production over quality, on greed over empathy.

“We’re living in an addicted society,” says Cope, “and not just addicted to drugs or alcohol or substances. We’re addicted to conflict and fame and social media. We’re addicted to getting what we want without working for it, without paying the price.”

‘Heroin & Helicopters opens with “Duck Confit,” a slow burning and arresting spoken word meditation that finds Cope looking in as much as he looks out, channeling the uneasy feeling that comes with recognizing your own role in perpetuating the very same social constructs you wish to change. “Where crimes of humanity are concealed and condoned / By self preservation and biblical prophecy...Where you know deep down inside / That something’s not right / Like a man killing the mother of his son / Cleaning his shotgun” he says over a simmering organ punctuated with 808 kicks. The track plays out like an overheard prayer, spiritual in its intimacy, and it sets the stage beautifully for a record unafraid to push boundaries and ask uncomfortable questions, questions that transcend any political party or movement and cut to the heart of what it means to be human.

“People try to politicize my music sometimes, but I don’t write political records,” Cope says definitively. “My music has always been built around consciousness.”

The first single “Justice” challenges our very notion of the concept, wondering if we’ve ever even seen what true righteousness looks like in this world. “The River” castigates and identifies a system built to devalue our lives… “They’ll take you down to the river / Leave you down by the river / They’ll shoot you down by the river / Leave you to drown by the river.” The heavy drum and piano laden swing of “Sally Walks” is clothed in the story of a lover who’s swallowed whole by addiction, but it’s not clear if Sally is the lover or the substance itself. Though it would be easy to despair in the face of it all, ‘Heroin & Helicopters’ insists on defiance, on standing up to power and resisting the force of the invisible hands that seem to guide our every move. “Yella” could almost be a country song, with Cope singing over acoustic guitar and a drum shuffle played by Abe Laboreal, Jr. With lyrics touching on the migration of people from small towns to big cities, Cope uses the analogy of a little league baseball player striking out, ultimately realizing that strength and redemption are gained through struggle, loss and failure. “And the baseball rolls slowly off the pitcher’s mound / As I stood in the batter’s box once they struck me out / I showed a sign a weakness and I swung my bat / And the fire that once burned yella turned to ash”

“Government / counterfeit / dollar bill / you worship it,” Cope sings on “War,” an infectious track produced by XZ, who worked closely with him in the studio. The song is a perfect distillation of Cope’s brand of wordplay and lyricism, where war not only represents a battlefield, but also alludes to an individual’s self inflicted inner turmoil, moving between the mandated laws of religion and society, and how we reconcile choices within the human psyche.

“Essentially, I’m trying to connect an emotion and lyrics and wrap them up in heavy drums,” he explains. “The music isn’t hip hop, it isn’t reggae, it isn’t pop, and it isn’t rock and roll. It doesn’t necessarily have a home, genre wise, but it lives in all of those places, it pays respect to all those places.”

Respect is ultimately what it all comes down to for Cope: respect for the art, respect for each other, respect for ourselves, respect for our instincts. At the end of the day, we all want the same things, and no matter how much the culture conditions us to believe that peace and happiness can be bought and sold, there’s no price tag because they come from within. Change, growth, and satisfaction require patience, work, and love. Seven years in the making, ‘Heroin & Helicopters’ is proof of that. 

Victoria Reed

Connect with this artist:

www.victoriareedmusic.com

One spring evening four years ago, Victoria Reed played her cards right. Sitting on the bed in her apartment in Chicago’s Wicker Park, she shuffled her tarot deck and laid out her life: For her present, she pulled the Death card—“and it felt spot on,” she says. A philosophy major at DePaul University, she had fallen down the rabbit hole of reason and was in the midst of an existential crisis par excellence, doubting everything and ready to give up. But then she played her future card: The Chariot. “It’s about overcoming any previous difficulties,” she explains. “It’s about triumph.”

And so, after that experience, she did what any budding performer would do: She wrote a song. “Let go and let flow/ I want to tell you that you’re not alone,” she sings in a lilting alto on “Chariot,” the title track of her debut album. “When tides are low/ The calvary best is shown.” 

Chariot, out February 26, is most definitely a triumph—a deeply personal collection of  Americana pop that echoes in your heart and ears long after the record ends. Featuring some of New York’s best session players and produced by Jeff Hill, it’s a rich, optimistic album that puts Reed’s intimate yet inclusive lyrics and alluring voice at the forefront, bringing to mind Neko Case’s The Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Jenny Lewis’s Acid Tongue. 

Performing was always in the cards for Reed, who was born to a rock musician and a Playboy Bunny in Detroit. Her father, Alto Reed, is the longtime saxophonist for Bob Seger, so she spent her childhood backstage at the city biggest venues and front-row at Tigers and Red Wings games as her dad wailed out the National Anthem. “I don’t think there was one moment of my life where I wasn’t thinking, Of course I’m going to be a singer someday,” Reed says. 

She started writing songs in grade school, drawing inspiration from her parents’ Carole King and Gordon Lightfoot records, and when she was 14 jetted off to Miami to record a few demos with a successful producer. “I was going to be a young teen pop star,” she says, but now is grateful that didn’t happen. “I was recording my songs over the tracks that Lindsey Lohan or Mandy Moore had passed on. It wasn’t right.”

Songwriting took a backseat when Reed moved to Chicago for college and began studying philosophy. She worked at “a spa for the spirit,” did an independent study in metaphysics, and assisted her then-boyfriend’s psychic mother “teach classes on developing your intuition.” But she missed making music and, after a failed attempt at mastering Ableton Live, finally picked up the guitar her dad had given her years ago and taught herself a few chords. Within a month she was out playing open-mic nights and recording bedroom demos, which she posted online. 

But her philosophy studies kept pulling her into a dark place and soon she was practically incapacitated by fear. “It was realizing that there is no backstage to life,” she says. “I just doubted everything away at one point and I was like, Oh shit.” A conversation with a numerologist at the spa where she worked put her back on track: Stop trying to do everything at once, he told her, and just focus on one thing. “I only had one semester worth of credits left to graduate, but I called my parents and said, ‘I’m dropping out of school. It's music. I’ve got to do music.’”

That very same day, Gary Waldman, a manager she had befriended at a Citizen Cope show two years before, emailed her out of the blue after hearing one of her songs on Facebook. “He said, ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me that you sing and write songs? Come to New York and I’ll help you make a cool recording.” Reed laughs at the memory. “And I was like, Yes! The Universe supports my decision!”

The next thing she knew, Reed—who had never before played with a band—was in a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, recording “Chariot” with a group of high-caliber session musicians who had put in time with Norah Jones and Ryan Adams. It was magical,” she says. “We didn’t talk about what kind of sound we were going for—it just happened.”

A few months later Reed packed up her Wicker Park apartment and moved to New York for good. She recorded Chariot slowly over the course of two years, but for her the pace was ideal. “This was all so new to me in the beginning, and as we went along I learned to express what I wanted in a room full of people who had been doing this for years.” 

One of Reed’s favorite songs on Chariot is “Make It Easy,” which was one of the last she wrote for the album. “You should wake up with a smile on your face/ Monday, Tuesday, everyday/ ’Cause honey I’m so happy for you,” she croons over gentle slide guitar. It’s a sentiment she wishes she could have told herself when things were difficult: “I had a funny revelation where I thought about my past self and present self and future self, and I thought, If me today could give advice to me two years ago I would say, ‘Are you kidding me? Don’t worry! Hang in there! You have no idea how good this gets.’” 

Now, Reed says, things are so good that she doesn’t feel the need to test her fate with tarot cards anymore. “I don't want to curse myself,” she admits. “If I get a bad future card, I won’t be able to stop thinking about it.” But the double Leo still believes in the stars, and for her 26th birthday had a reading with her favorite astrologer. “She put things in perspective for me in a cool way—what’s happened in the past few years and where I’m headed—and it brought me some clarity and even some closure.” But Reed, ever cautious, won’t share specifics. “It was all positive,” she says, her smile audible. “Really positive.” 

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