By: Pierry Parmera
Algonquin song writing professor, Richard Cooper and his band The Cooper Brothers is releasing a new album called Southbound in April this year.
Richard Cooper and Brian Cooper, his brother and the lead singer of the band, will look to consolidate the legacy of the 39-year-old band with the new album by holding a series of concerts after the release of the album in April.
The Cooper Brothers, a seven-piece band, is trying to maintain the southern flavour for which they are well-known in their upcoming album. This is an attempt to keep their current audience and gain some new fans.
“We’d like to get some new people but our audience is older,” said Richard.
Indeed, the country-rock genre which the band plays attracts a much older audience. “When we play it’s not 20-year-old kids that come, it’s people in their 40s,” he said.
As expected, the album will typically have a very southern American tone—a theme which is quintessential to the band. “There are lots of songs about the south and that southern flavour,” he said. “In fact, when people hear us, they think that we are a southern American rock band but we are Canadians.”
In the single Southbound, which encapsulates the whole theme of the album, Cooper encourages people to leave the frigid Canadian winter and venture somewhere warmer and greener.
“We live in this great place but sometimes we want to get out of here,” said Cooper. “I don’t like it here in January or February,” he said, referring to the often brutal cold of the winter.
Although the songs have a southern rock tone which evokes a foreign resonance, Cooper described the process of writing all the songs as very natural because he has been doing this for decades.
“The guys just come up with ideas and I write the songs that relate to our message,” he said.
Yet, Copper encourages hard work in the process of writing. “The inspiration is minor,” he said. “It’s the perspiration that’s more important.”