Alan Brown - Corduroy Brown

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 befo...