Songwriter Cory Branan breaks down the craft behind some of his best songs
Joshua Black Wilkins photo
As someone who regularly saw 100-plus concerts a year pre-pandemic, I feel the following declarative statements carries some weight:
Cory Branan is my favorite singer-songwriter to see play live.
Heck, Cory Branan is also my favorite guitar player to see live.
His approach to hammering an acoustic's six strings doesn't feel like anyone else's. There's a swift dexterity to his picking that's great, but it's when he gets off-kilter that he really shines. Branan treats his guitar like it's his longtime best friend who may have drunkenly said some cross words about his wife and now they're engaged in a bar brawl. He attacks his instrument, banging the body and pummeling the strings with atypical rhythmic tempos. Even in the calm moments, he'll bust out impromptu pace changes that stretch out the quiet moments, then seconds later scurry to make up for lost time.
And that's all before getting to the fact that he's one of the cleverest lyricists around. No singer-songwriter quite as effectively walks the line between sweet Southern charm and rebellious razor's-edge rabble-rouser. It's the reason I never miss a chance to see Branan live, whether it's in cow-skull adorned folky venues, dingy punk clubs, or even once in the corner of a hotel lobby at SXSW.
Since his songwriting has always stuck out from the pack, we chatted with Branan about the process behind some of his discography's standout songs.
"ANOTHER NIGHTMARE IN AMERICA," ADIOS (2017)
Branan's most sharp-tongued protest song, "Another Nightmare in America" acts as a rallying cry against police violence by adapting the partial perspective of a racist officer. Despite being written years before George Floyd's murder, its bitter bile remains ever relevant.
"That's the whole thing," Branan says. "I wrote it after Ferguson, but it is, unfortunately, quite the evergreen subject in this country. I can't wait for it to be non-relevant.
"I was just spitting mad. But I know, as a white Southern male, this is not my story to tell, but this is my country and this is a shameful disgrace. And I still wanted to write about it. And so I went, 'I'll write it from the point of view of the racist killer cop.'"
It's a biting critique of the American dream in a similar "musical Trojan Horse with gutting lyrics hidden inside" mold to what Randy Newman did in the '70s with Sail Away, but with much more blunt force trauma.
"It's sort of a sonic experiment," Branan says. "I wanted to make it so catchy that you're tempted to sort of bop your head and not listen to the words. That's why I started without any music and I get that line in: "You uppity little ghost." And as soon as you hear that trigger word — uppity — there's no way to not listen to the lyrics."
The key is that the song slightly stretches beyond simply being the character's completely un-self-aware perspective to frame the acts he's committing as true horrors.
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