CRe02: Corduroy Brown - Charlie Romans

Take just a second to imagine that one of your closest friends was a talented musician, and not just talented but so good that he made everything look easy. Imagine that when he picks up a guitar, he kind of melds with it, and the sound that vibrates from the strings catch you on the most basic level and pulls you through into the story. The man becomes his music, and that music wraps around you until everything else falls away. Joy and sadness are immediate and intimate, the way good music and good friends always are. But you don’t have to imagine it at all. All you need to do is listen to the genuine passion of Corduroy Brown.

Corduroy Brown is a pop-rock band out of Huntington, West Virginia, and lead singer Alan Brown grew up in Chesapeake, Ohio. “I grew up right here, and I’ve lived here all my life,” Brown said. “I live in Huntington now, but I grew up right down the road. I consider the whole area my home now.”

Brown’s path to the music he plays was neither straight nor easy. “No one in my family is musical at all,” he confessed. “I think I have an uncle who plays the saxophone – kinda. But in 2008, when all my friends were bringing guitars to high school, I was like, “I want to do that!” So my mom got me my first guitar for Christmas, and it was a Fender CD 60 model from Mac N Dave’s, and she paid way too much money for it.” But proof that her investment paid off in his music, and Brown is quick to acknowledge the impact it has had on his life.

“It has been such a blessing,” he said. “Music is something that has just and is still changing my life every day.” The timelessness of music also appeals to him, and Brown said that he loves seeing videos of musicians who are playing well into their eighties and beyond. “And music is something that uses both sides of you brain so it is so powerful, and I feel lucky to get to do this every single day.”

Brown said he began learning guitar while he was listening to heavy metal and death metal, or, as he said, “anything with screaming and big heavy, chunky guitars.” “That eventually dissolved down a little,” he said with a laugh. “But don’t get me wrong, I still listen to it on road trips. So if I feel a little sleepy, we’re going to be listening to some heavy stuff,” he said appreciatively. “But some of my more formative stuff, when I really started learning to play were from groups like Flyleaf, from back in 2004.” That group had a female lead, he said and is still one of his favorite bands of the day. Other favorites included Dave Matthews and Howlmouth, but he said he grew up listening to tapes of Michael Jackson.

The voice, that intangible quality that makes a musician’s music uniquely his own, is something Brown said was an evolution. And the current album, including the single “Who I am for Now,” began to gel when Corduroy Brown became a band. “The song and the whole album is basically me calling myself out for the things I didn’t like about myself,” he said. “It’s about how I grew from situations. The music takes a long time for me to write because I want to make sure that I really mean what I’m saying. I don’t want to fill in a verse with “Oh, that rhymes, so it works.” It might put me at a disadvantage, but I want to mean that.”

“I think between getting mental health figured out, and just life in general, a lot of these songs are just my life encompassed in a three-and-a-half-minute package,” Brown said. And the mental health aspect became vital to him in 2017 when he began taking mental health seriously. Brown said that he thinks even in high school, he had started self-harm, which manifested itself in cutting himself. “It started off really small, and I wasn’t telling anyone,” he said. “But then through college, it became worse, and more violent and out of control. And then it became even more serious, and I finally got to the point where I had to do something.”

Brown said he told himself he had to get help before he killed himself with the behavior. He said that was not something he wanted, but he became concerned that it could happen. And dealing with those struggles was something he said became part of who he is, another aspect of the man behind the music. “It’s part of who I am,” he said, and added that it is an important piece that seeps into the music. “I’m not trying to write mental health music, but it seeps into it,” Brown said. “Just like I consider myself a Christian, but I’m not writing Christian music. But it’s all part of the whole.”

Corduroy Brown performing at the Clay Center on February 19th. Photo by Rafael Barker.

“I didn’t know it was that bad until I started getting help,” he said of cutting. “And I asked my therapist why I was doing it. The answer was like the biggest light bulb moment of my life. He told me it was like a pressure relief valve and that I felt in control of it.” From that point, Brown said he realized that he no longer had to hurt himself, and was able to move past it. “But it was easy for me to get help because I was finally ready to accept it, and I don’t think I was ready before that,” Brown said he was lucky that he was able to get help, to see the other side of it, before he went too far. And now he feels strong enough to talk about it and help others with similar problems.

Overall, he said, the album and the song are about growth. “We’re not supposed to be the same people we were, even five days or five months ago,” Brown said. “We’re supposed to evolve, we’re supposed to shift, and we’re supposed to grow. We are supposed to be changing because stagnancy, I think, is one of the most dangerous things you can ever be as a human. There is a difference between stagnancy and routine,” he qualified. “But you are allowed to change, and you’re allowed to grow. That song, “Who I am for Now,” was written back in 2017 when I was struggling, and I got help that year.”

Corduroy Brown’s latest album came out in August 2021, and Brown said that it was in the works for about a year and a half. “A lot of the songs are about things that had been bubbling up, and waiting for the right things to happen. Before that could happen, though, Brown became extremely ill that February. “I caught COVID in January,” Brown said. “Then a month went by, and I went to the hospital, and they gave me medicine,” he said. Then when his condition didn’t improve, and added to his symptoms were insomnia and not eating, he decided to go to the hospital at St. Mary’s.

“So, they came into the room and said, “Hey Mr. Brown, We’re going to have to put you on a ventilator.” The nurses were starting to panic, and there was an urgency to it, and I wondered what on earth was going on. I had been there for four days, but then it was like holy crap, we’ve got to go.” Brown said he was told that he was in heart, kidney, and lung failure, and he said that he texted his parents the grim news as he was being wheeled out of his room to be ventilated. And on the way, barely able to breathe, he said he could see the stark concern in the nurse’s eyes as he faded in and out of consciousness.

“But then I remember being in this infinite white space,” Brown said. “When people talk about seeing a white light when they die, it’s completely real,” he said. “I could see myself and white space as far as I could see. And there was this ball of energy that started on my left side then slowly drifted off into the distance. What I didn’t know until later was that when I woke up days later, I was in a completely different hospital on life support in Morgantown.” Brown later discovered that he had died on the transport helicopter and was brought back to life – which coincided with the time he experienced the white light.

Brown said that there is so much you learn in a hospital bed, and though most of the album’s songs were written, his experience provided the catalyst to truly finish them. And the experience has made him more introspective, he said. “When you are lying there faced with your own mortality and thinking of the things you had planned to do, you wish you had done them. So that has become my battle cry after that. Life is for living, and make sure that you live.” That experience also, he said, is a component of what his music has become, and more components are added to the mosaic every single day.

Corduroy Brown can be followed on Facebook and Instagram, and currently, they are booking performances through September.

Easily find them online here: https://linktr.ee/corduroybrownwv