Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper

 

Peter Cooper is an East Nashville-based singer, songwriter, touring artist, sideman, producer, college professor, and award-winning journalist.  His first solo album, Mission Door, released in 2008 received critical acclaim as have his two albums with duo partner Eric Brace and his most recent solo project, The Lloyd Green Album.  He is a Grammy-nominated producer for the acclaimed 2011 release I Love: Tom T. Hall's Songs of Fox Hollow.

Upon the completion of Peter Cooper’s debut album, Mission Door, American Songwriter magazine proclaimed it “Cooper’s diploma from the Tom T. Hall School of Damn Good Songwriting.” Cooper's second solo album was The Lloyd Green Album, another step in his on-going collaboration with the pedal steel Hall of Famer.  He has also released two duo works with Eric Brace, You Don't Have to Like Them Both and Master Sessions (with Lloyd Green and Mike Auldridge).  Cooper's work has won praise from each of his chief influences: Hall, John Prine, Todd Snider, Eric Taylor, and Kris Kristofferson. The latter said, “Peter Cooper looks at the world with an artist’s eye and a human heart and soul. His songs are the work of an original, creative imagination, alive with humor and heartbreak and irony and intelligence, with truth and beauty in the details. Deep stuff. And they get better every time you listen.”

Named one of Nashville’s “10 Most Interesting People” by Nashville Arts & Entertainment magazine, Cooper is also a session player, a producer who has worked with Snider, Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs, Fayssoux Starling McLean, and others, a professor of country music at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, and a senior music writer at Nashville’s daily paper, The Tennessean. 

Opening Day [Single]

Opening Day [Single]

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1. Opening Day

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Lyrics

The odds are on the odds-on favorites
They can kill you with their murderer’s row
They got a young phenom calling home to Mom
Sayin’, “Watch, I’m gonna put on a show”
They can hit for power, they can steal a base
They got a crafty skipper with a poker face
They’re gonna race away with the pennant race
Couple of breaks, we might take fourth place
Couple of breaks

All’s well that ends well
‘Round here things don’t end well
But we’re tied for first, with the whole summer left to play
Fall breaks kind for the lucky ones
Winter comes even to the champions
Keep the aftermath and the epitaph
Give me Opening Day


I’ve been coming since before I remember
I seen the pictures to prove that it’s so
The season’s design’ll knock your heart out of line
And lay it on you til you’re laying low
I have seen more big names than you could name
I’ve seen a whole lot of dreams when they pull up lame
Sad September is a crying shame
Won’t you take me out to the new ballgame

CHORUS

When it feels like summer in the springtime
Like morning in the afternoon
But we are weak up the middle
Dull at the corners
And the dog days come too soon

I guess my father was the first to teach me
That my mother never understood
That it is not fair, and the deal ain’t square
All you can do is just to try to make good
You know the players will always change
Mostly the uniforms stay the same
Put your picture in a pretty frame
Pass the mustard, share the blame
Pass the mustard

CHORUS

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