Little Rebellion Music

For me, interviews have always been about going beyond the new single or album, and finding out someone’s story. And Average Joes’ Lenny Cooper has quite a tale to tell. Growing up in rural North Carolina, Cooper and his friends spent their free time mud bogging. Only just 17, he wrote a song called ‘Mud Digger,’ posted it to YouTube, made some CDs for his friends, and went back to mud bogging. Without any additional promotion, the song started making its way around and pretty soon, he attracted the attention of Colt Ford and Average Joes. Now, millions of YouTube views and hundreds of thousands of album sales later, he is gearing up to release his second album, Mud Dynasty, in stores on May 7, 2013. You can find the music video for the title track, which got a great treatment, below.

The way Lenny Cooper found his audience is a great story. The initial success may have been unintentional but he subsequently worked hard, and smart, to develop his fanbase. Read on to find out how the story unfolded for him, what changed when making music became part of a business, and more importantly, what didn’t.

UCN: You are described in your bio as “an accidental artist.” What does that phrase mean to you?
Lenny Cooper: I had no plan for this. Music has always been my dream though, I started writing music when I was probably around 11. But I just sat down and recorded myself at the house, you know, I was just messing around. Then we were all sitting in the Walmart parking lot one day, where we would hang out after school, and my friends started saying I should write a song about all of us going mud digging. That’s what we always did, there was nothing else to do around our town. So I wrote the song and I made five CDs and give those out to friends. I put it on YouTube and I tagged Colt Ford in it, because we were all big fans of Colt. I still didn’t think anything of it other than maybe he will see it. But after four months it had over two million views. We first thought it was a mistake, but it turned out to be because people thought it was Colt Ford. When he played live people had started asking him to play ‘Mud Digger’ and he would go “that’s not me.” It got to the point where he said “we have to find this guy.” Then one day he was playing down the street from me at a mud bog. He somehow found out I was there, and had a security guy come and find me. Colt told me “that ‘Mud Digger’ song, man, that’s a good hit you’ve got going there. We’ve got to do something with that.” Within a few months, I got a phone call from Shannon [Houchins, CEO of Average Joes] and I ended up signing a record deal with Average Joes. I’ve been going strong with them now for almost 5 years.

UCN: How did you first notice the song was taking off?
LC: Well, I had only made five CDs just for my friends, but two months later we went to Myrtle Beach and we’re walking down the strip and we hear the song. So I’m like “who’s playing that?!” [smiles] We kept hearing it. We went all the way down to Florida and I heard it blasting there too. So we’re saying “man, this is crazy, how did they get it?” It made me feel great to know people liked it and enjoyed it, because I had made it just for people in my hometown, for my friends. I never thought it would turn into something bigger, I never planned on it. Yes, it was a dream, but it wasn’t a dream I was pushing for because I never thought I’d be able to do it. But now I’ve gone from chasing a dream to living a dream.

UCN: So those five CDs basically had babies at it spread from there. [smiles]
LC: Pretty much! Laughs

UCN: That’s great though, because that’s as organic as it can get.
LC: Yeah, just kept going and ended up being nationwide. I just wanted people to hear to song because I thought it was pretty cool. I liked that my friends liked it but I wasn’t actually sure anybody else would like it too.

UCN: I guess it wasn’t written with other people in mind, it was just for you guys.
LC: Exactly. I didn’t realize it could be a hit. It blew my mind. I mean, I’m still shocked to this day that I get to sit here doing what I’m doing now and making music. [smiles]

UCN: What changed after the song was picked up?
LC: I was still in school and I didn’t really have a lot of time to write music. Even though it was going viral like it was, I didn’t know what to do. I was only 17 at the time. People were talking to me about copyrights and stuff and I didn’t know. But luckily Colt Ford found me and Average Joes took me under their wing and made this all happen.

UCN: How did they help you initially?
LC: Shannon told me straightaway this is not a get-rich-quick thing. He said “we’ll recut it, but we don’t know what it will do, we’ll have to see how it takes.” We recut it and two months later he told me “we have to get you an album, man, people are wanting more.” I had a show right after that with Colt, so I had to get a band together within three weeks. I wrote seven songs at the same time and went out to Alabama to open up for Colt in front of 4000 people. I’d never been in front of a crowd like that before in my life! Ever since then, getting on stage was like an adrenaline switch, and now it’s all I want to do. I love to see fans being happy when I’m out there performing.

UCN: At the first shows, I assume people didn’t know the other songs so you got to see the immediate response whether or not the liked the rest.
LC: True, they didn’t know the songs. In the end, only one out of those seven songs ended up on the album. At that time, I was still finding the line I wanted to go down so at first it was more of a rock thing. People liked it but I did think that I don’t want to throw them off too much after them hearing ‘Mud Digger.’ I didn’t want them feeling like the other songs didn’t sound anything like that. After that, I started playing off the ‘Mud Digger’ theme and it created a whole new me. People were still kind of like “we love the music but who is Lenny Cooper?” They couldn’t put a face to the music. I’ve been doing it for a while now and I’m starting to get noticed by people.

UCN: Yes, you are your own person now and you are no longer ‘not-Colt Ford’.
LC: Exactly! [laughs] That’s another reason why me and Colt did the remix of ‘Mud Digger,’ so people would know there were two people, and that I was the original artist who did the song.

UCN: The new album will be released in May. How did you start putting that together?
LC: Last year we were on tour and Shannon suggested we start working on a new record. I asked him “what do you think we should call it?” and he went “I don’t know yet.” And then one day I was just at my house and he texted me saying ‘mud dynasty.’

UCN: Was that the whole text, just ‘mud dynasty’? [smiles]
LC: Yeah, that’s all it said: mud dynasty. [smiles] Of course, at that point we still didn’t have the song ‘Mud Dynasty.’ That song came about halfway through writing the album. We wrote it but it was totally different, so I was kind of nervous at first. I was worried it sounded so different people might not like it, but then I thought that maybe because it’s not what they expect, they might like it more. So we just took the chance and did it. The album has got a lot of cool features on it. I’ve got Brian King from The LACS on it too. And me and Bluefoot from the MTV show Buck Wild did a song called ‘Mud Life.’ That turned out really good. There are more cool features on it but I want people to be surprised when they get the album. But it’s definitely diverse.

UCN: I get that. On the one hand, you don’t want to get too far away from ‘Mud Digger,’ but on the other, you don’t want a record with 12 ‘Mud Digger‘s on it.
LC: Exactly, and that started to happen a little, you know. We had about five ‘Mud Digger’-type songs. Everyone loved them and we ended up doing the Mud Digger CDs. We put other artists on it and it was a really big success. We’re working on volume 4 right now.

UCN: When you were writing for this record thinking about wanting it to be different, but then again not too different, how did you approach it? What inspired those songs?
LC: What inspires me is going to all the different states to perform, and seeing how people do things a lot different than what we would do. Traveling inspires me and gives me ideas to start writing. I will write some lines down and then later think ‘what can I turn this into?’ One time we were in Florida and they had these big mud buggies with stripper poles on the back and girls dancing on them. I ended up writing a song called ‘Rodeo’ about that and every time we play that live, the place goes crazy. [smiles]

UCN: How does having to think about the business of making records feel to you? How did the process of the second record feel compare to the first?
LC: I feel like I’ve learned a lot! When I listen to my first album, it really feels like crawling before I walked. The first album was the crawling stage, and this is me walking on the second album. It feels totally like me. I actually let go, I didn’t hold back. On the first album I think I was nervous. I still did a good job but for the second album I thought, you know, I’m just going to go all out and give them all I’ve got.

UCN: Did the success of the first record give you the confidence to not hold back this time?
LC: Yes, it did give me the confidence. A lot of people really liked it, and we had a big hit on the first album which was ‘Big Tires.’ Back then, I loved what I was doing, but I didn’t really know what I was doing, you know? It was so different for me. I didn’t know anything about coming into a real studio working with all this equipment that I had never seen before. At home,  when I did ‘Mud Digger,’ I had a little tiny microphone that I bought from Walmart for $12. [laughs] Then suddenly I’m using thousands of dollars worth of equipment to make music. That was something that took me a while to take in…

UCN: That is a lot of change to take in.
LC: It definitely changed my life and how I look at things too. People sometimes ask me if I feel like I’ve changed and, no, I’m always going to be the same person I am. Just because I do music for a living now doesn’t mean that I’m different. It doesn’t make me any better than anybody else. I just got an opportunity to do what I love and I’m gonna run with it as far as I can.

UCN: The music video has a great concept. I’m curious where the whole Scarface idea came from for this. It’s one of my favorite movies!
LC: It was Shannon’s idea. He wrote the script for the music video. When he first presented it to me I thought, man, this is not gonna work. But he said “just trust me,” and so I was like, okay… Then when we shot the music video and it started coming together, I looked at Shannon and I was like “I understand it now.” We were kind of reenacting scenes from Scarface but basically selling mud. It was sort of a metaphor. It’s basically what we do with selling music, it’s all about the mud theme and country living. So we did this whole Scarface scene with wearing a suit with the sleeves cut off and smoking cigars. It’s funny and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I just put my faith in Shannon for this. It might not have sounded right when he was explaining it but usually it ends up that he’s right. [laughs]

UCN: And finally, after all this talk about mud bogs and buggies, you know, I grew up in Europe and when I first heard about this I was like “what’s a mud bog?”
LC: [laughs] That’s funny. Yeah, it’s not everywhere.

UCN: So for everybody else who doesn’t know, what should we imagine when you talk about where you grew up?
LC: A mud bog is nothing but a big field full of trucks that you never imagined, as big as they are. It’s big four wheelers, women in bikinis, just people having a good time. You then you also have mud holes with stuff you’re running over, and that can go from logs to boulders to even cars. It’s just total fun! [smiles]

For all things Lenny Cooper, to pre-order the new album, and find out future tour dates, please visit lennycoopermusic.com.

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Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.

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