“That’s the music I was raised on,” explains the singer-songwriter who grew up in a small town between Atlanta and Athens, GA. “Creedence and Bill Withers...Waylon Jennings and Bob Dylan. When I first started playing I was sort of running from that—a kid just trying to be different. I was into metal for awhile, and when I was first in college, I really tried to get into indie rock—but I quickly went back to the music I grew up on and always loved, for all the emotion and feeling behind it. It’s soul music.”

That legacy of soul asserts itself mightily in the deep and engaging music from this gifted performer and writer. From the earliest days singing his own songs solo in local clubs at 18, to touring across the continental U.S. with a practiced band behind him has all led him to the November 11, 2008, release of his striking Gold and the Sand album. Listeners can hear Corey speaking from his own soul on this record. It’s in the confidential whisper with which he sometimes sings, in the sound of the instrumentation, with its rock influences, strings and horns, and in the lyrics he writes, that bring it all together. 

After high school, Corey followed his high school sweetheart (now his wife) to Greenville, SC, where she attended Furman University. It was there he set about producing his two homemade collections of songs that turned out to have remarkably broad appeal. Corey first reached national attention when his self-penned song, “Here’s Looking at You Kid,” was spotted on his MySpace page by producers of the MTV reality series The Real World. They employed it to augment the sort of emotional moment audiences remember. “They played it over the finale of the last show of the season, with the couple hugging at the airport!“ Corey recalls. “And that brought a lot of recognition.” More of Crowder’s early tunes appeared on such TV series as Bad Girls, The Biggest Loser, and One Ocean View, and total listens on his MySpace page skyrocketed into the millions. Sales of his early independent albums were boosted, too.

During those three years in Greenville, he assembled a backing band, bringing him one step closer to achieving his goal of a fuller and fully realized sound. “I’d been wanting to find a group of people who believed in the personal songs I wanted to do.” By the time he got to the studio in Seattle to meet with Aaron Sprinkle (producer of Gold and the Sand), Corey was confident about his vision and wanted a producer that would compliment this vision and further define his sound. In Aaron, he found just that. “Aaron didn’t want to change a thing about the songs—just work with me on the instrumentation. And that was very exciting.” Aaron took hold of Corey’s songs and brought them to life. He took old-school instrumentation techniques and altered them in such a way that ultimately became the perfect catalyst to bring out the new and fully developed Corey Crowder sound they had both been searching for.

The result of Corey and Aaron’s meeting is a set of twelve songs as broadly themed as something you would expect from Van Morrison, Tony Joe White or even Lynyrd Skynyrd for that matter—but with contemporary lyrics that aim to reflect today’s over-hurried world and the pressures brought about in meeting the expectations of a friend or spouse and in dealing with the notion of pride or of change. 

For all the emotional power of his rock attack, his lyric writing has evolved into a new level of texture and maturity. The songs on Gold and the Sand have subtle shades of meaning that are developed through complex word choice and surprising twists and turns in his storylines. Being a contract writer for EMI in Nashville has given Corey the experience and tools he has needed to truly advance his lyrical abilities. This kind musical development is not always about technicalities or improved skills; it’s also about personal growth – an ongoing theme in Corey’s lyrics. Two songs on the new album speak to that even in their titles—“I’ve Become Something” and “Look How Far We’ve Come.”

“I’m finding,” Corey says, “ that your mid-twenties are really when you learn a lot about yourself, and ask the big questions. I really needed to write some songs about things I’ve never tackled before.”