Thursday night the Live on the Green concert series concluded in downtown Nashville with a performance by Clarence Greenwood aka Citizen Cope. True to his moniker, Cope Nation’s first citizen seems to be doing fine, just fine, and delivered a pleasant and thoroughly unsurprising show on one of this year’s last available warm summer evenings. Mr. Greenwood opened with “Bullet and a Target” and “Hurricane Waters” for his 2nd and 3rd songs, closed with “Son’s Gonna Rise,” and filled in the gap with assorted other placid anonymous numbers.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Citizen Cope, and especially the three songs mentioned. He has a very nice sound- his problem is that he has but one very nice sound, and it gets used on every tune. Over the course of two hours, this becomes a little tiring, considering that his trademark style is even-keel, middle-of-the-road, and impassive. Oh how I craved for Mr. Greenwood to suddenly say, “Cut the &%#*- it’s time to rock out!” and reveal that in fact his piano player had been hiding a massive double-necked guitar under his bench. I sensed that the crowd seemed to crave this as well, as some initial crowd-surfing (some of which ended disastrously, if you can imagine Thursday night downtown Nashville at its best) eventually gave way to appreciative head-bobbing and tempo-appropriate shuffling.
But the band stayed true to its easy-going, stolid and very subtly island-y folk-rock, a style that falls sonically somewhere in between reggae and Coldplay but captures the excitement of neither. I also would have preferred that Cope play his reggae cover of “Karma Police” (obviously), an unusual recasting that manages to simultaneously pep-up and chill-out a song that fairly begs for both. Nevertheless, for a free concert put on by a sub-par radio station, Citizen Cope was perfectly acceptable material, and proved an apt soundtrack for whiling away a pleasant evening.
