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Written by Kurt Brighton
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Friday, 09 November 2007 |
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 Imagine this: it’s 2002, and you’re a singer/songwriter who has just been compared with Conor Oberst and Ryan Adams in Rolling Stone magazine. You get booked on “The Late Show with David Letterman” and “Last Call with Carson Daly.” Time to start accepting applications for your entourage, crank out a mediocre follow-up album, date a series of nubile starlets and shop around for your eventual rehab center, right?
Not Cory Branan. The Fayetteville, Arkansas-based troubadour, who found himself in that very situation in 2002 and 2003—minus the entourage, rehab and starlets—didn’t let it get to him. And since he didn’t get an inflated ego when he was being lauded, it didn’t really affect him when those same scribes started griping that it took him four years to release a second album.
“That was all back in ’Nam,” he said with a chuckle. “It didn’t amount to anything. In fact, Rolling Stone recently did a little piece on their hits and misses, and now I’m a ‘miss.’ Oh well.”
If he sounds amused about the whole thing, and even a little embarrassed, it’s because he is a humble guy without an ounce of arrogance. He posted a hilarious faux-interview on his MySpace site on the revocation of his “hotness,” including musings on how he’ll probably have to stand in line at the tanning salon now, and that the hotness recall probably means his insurance will go up.
He also mentions to a surprised “interviewer” that in addition to fretting about his hotness, he also plays music, which is kind of the point that Rolling Stone missed.
Branan’s The Hell You Say, the record that won him that short-lived acclaim, as well as the eventual follow-up in 2006 with 12 Songs are both sharp-witted, stark portraits of heartache and longing, often viewed through the glittering filter of a whiskey glass in need of a refill. But these aren’t sloppy bar songs: Branan is a careful craftsman, especially when it comes to his heartbreak songs, a trait he shares with heroes like John Prine, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits.
“I’m a spaz when I play,” he said. “But when I come to those songs I try to say it better. I put it on a pedestal. If it’s something sappy, I try to balance it, I try to set it in the stone of something common. I don’t mind saying stupid shit, I just try not to say too much of it.”
He doesn’t. 12 Songs takes the mostly ballad-driven formula of his first album and bends the strings a bit, adding an indie-rock punch to some of the songs while still retaining a number of acoustic-based ballads. It’s also an excellent album, but Branan is excited about the new batch of songs he is getting ready to record in a few months.
“It’s completely written, which is new for me,” he said. “That last album was all written around the same time as the record before. There’s almost a theme running through these songs. I think it’s going to be called Midtown—like midtown is limbo maybe, between the rich part of town and the poor part of town. I’ve never worked on a record as a record—there’s kind of a beginning, a middle and an end. It was exactly the opposite on the last record—it was just 12 f***ing songs.”
And although when one thinks of “theme” records, overproduced epic bands of the ’70s like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer come to mind, Branan plans to err on the side of caution.
“It’ll be a little more fleshed out, but not overdone,” he said. “Now that I know a lot of other musicians I have more of a palette available to me. Even on the last record, on some of the songs where I feel like I kind of went too far, there’s only four instruments on a song.”
Ever the humble southerner, Branan quickly adds:
“It’s not going to be ‘grand’ or anything. I mean, every wind I break isn’t genius.”
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TO GO
Cory Branan with Jon Snodgrass
9 p.m.
Sunday Nov. 11
Lucky Joe’s, 25 Old Town Square
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