One Lovely Day by Citizen Cope

One Lovely Day, the sixth studio album from Clarence Greenwood's Citizen Cope, arrived on July 17, 2012, as the second release on Rainwater Recordings, the label he'd set up two years earlier after stints at Capitol, DreamWorks, Arista and RCA. Going it alone didn't cost him his audience: it climbed to 39 on the Billboard 200 and 11 on both the rock and independent album charts.

Nobody was expecting a reinvention, and he doesn't offer one. This is the Memphis-born, D.C.-raised songwriter doing what he does, stirring blues, soul, folk, rock and a little hip-hop into slow, unhurried grooves and sanding the joins down until they barely show. Critics mostly liked it without swooning: the kinder reviews praised its mellow eclecticism and the care he takes arranging familiar sounds, not any bold new ideas. For the devoted fans who'd followed him this far, that sweetness was plenty.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.