Bio

“There’s some planted down in the dirt of every hometown,” Cooper Alan sings in the first moments of “Roots,” the opening track from his long-awaited debut album Winston-Salem. “There’s the tree you can see, then there’s roots.” Describing it as a “good old driving American country-rock song,” Alan intended “Roots” as a tribute to the daily unsung heroes he saw holding it all together around him in our country — firefighters, police, teachers, truck drivers, farmers, and military. But it doubles as an overture for the album altogether. From here, Alan sings about who raised you, strangers you meet along the way, the trials you face, the bars you frequent. He sings about all the things that make us who we are to introduce a debut that captures everything about who he is as a man and a musician. 

At this point, Alan has enough singles he could’ve already released an album or two. It’s been six years of nurturing a fanbase, building a catalogue, his voice and viewpoint fully-formed from the beginning but only growing more assured and nuanced with time and various genre experiments along the way. The series of one-offs allowed Alan to explore all the different moods and styles, from vulnerable meditations on mental health to rollicking good-time drinking songs. When it finally came time to collect all these in his first full-length statement, there was only one name for it: Winston-Salem, a nod to Alan’s hometown. His roots, the place that made him.

From a young age, Alan knew he wanted to play music. It started with cover bands in 8th grade, then party bands in college, and eventually entertaining patrons across the honky-tonks of Nashville’s Lower Broadway…

READ MORE