Cory Branan

McGonigel’s Mucky Duck presents Cory Branan.

Cory Branan is an American singer-songwriter, born in Southaven, Mississippi.

By his teens, Branan was playing hard rock and heavy metal, eventually fronting a Black Sabbath cover band. In his early 20?s he began to explore the music of John Prine, a move which urged him to pick up a guitar and start writing songs.

In 2000, the Memphis chapter of NARAS awarded Branan with the Phillips Award for “Newcomer of the Year.” He didn’t even have a recording contract yet, and the acclaim started rolling in. Two years later, Branan made his label debut with Memphis’ MADJACK Records with the release of The Hell You Say. In 2003 he appeared on both The Late Show with David Letterman and Last Call With Carson Daly.

Throughout his career, Cory Branan has been too punk for country, too country for punk, too Memphis for Nashville, and probably a little too Cory Branan for anyone’s damn good. He has proven himself as a top-notch songwriter (Chuck Ragan recently called him “the greatest songwriter of our generation”), fierce lyricist (in Lucero’s “Tears Don’t Matter Much” they sing that Cory has, “a way with words that’ll bring you to your knees”), and a hyperdynamic performer with the ability to fingerpick finer than ‘60s Greenwich Village folkies and brutally strum like a proto punk shredder.

Across three albums, he’s made collective struggles poetic and breakthroughs into sympathetic acts of populist heroism.

Cory Branan is a natural-born storyteller, his seemingly conversational, painstakingly crafted anecdotes benefitting from a hard-eyed stare at hydra-headed life experiences. Not unlike his musical and literary pedestal sitters, from John Prine and Leonard Cohen to Raymond Carver and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cory’s gift for detail and phrase-turning is a thing of wonder.

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/Corybranan