Citizen Cope

Citizen Cope is the stage name of singer-songwriter Clarence Greenwood and also the name of his band featuring Jim Gaines and Vladimir Meller. Citizen Cope play a kind of urban folk, merging blues, folk, hip-hop and rock influences.

Greenwood was born in Memphis but raised mainly in Washington and first appeared on the albums of Maryland rapper Basehead in the early 1990s. He then released his first Citizen Cope album, 'Cope Citizen' in 1992. For the rest of the 1990s he contributed to independent compilations and performing on the soundtracks of films such as 'Eat Me' and 'Clubland'. He appeared on Lazy K's album 'Life in One Day' in 1997.

After recording an unreleased album with Capitol he moved to the Dreamworks label and released the album 'Citizen Cope' in 2000. After another label change to Arista his next album was the 2004 work 'The Clarence Greenwood Recordings'. This aroused much critical interest and his song 'Son's Gotta Rise' was used in a GM Pontiac commercial. Santana and Sheryl Crow both covered his emotive song 'Sideways'.

His next albums were 'Every Waking Moment' (2006) and the independently-released 'The Rainwater LP' in 2010. An increasingly mellow sound was displayed on 2012's 'One Lovely Day'.

After an absence of seven years Citizen Cope returned in 2019 with the memorably-titled album 'Heroin and Helicopters', a reference to a warning from Santana to avoid both heroin and helicopters. The first single from the album was 'Justice'.