Liners for LOVE STREET / DOWN AVENUE Erik Koskinen (Real Phonic Records 4/5/24):
“There are great musicians you have never heard. They live out their lives in small towns and work regular jobs. They play their asses off on Friday nights, and everybody dances. They have their own thing. It’s where the real music comes from.
It used to be hard to find the music that could change your life, not because it didn’t exist, but because it was work chasing down obscure references, sifting through the lipstick traces. Now everyone has access to everything all the time, and none of it seems to matter. Americana isn’t a genre but a chamber of commerce hanging bunting on a ghost town, and a great record isn’t a needle in a haystack, it’s a needle in an endless stack of digital needles. Everyone is siloed in the dark of their own preferences, wondering who turned the lights out.
And then you hear the real thing again.
Erik Koskinen picked up electric guitar as a kid from Bernie Larsen, an original member of David Lindley’s El Rayo-X band, who had fetched up in rural northern Michigan from Los Angeles with a handful of ska and reggae records, and a pile of amps and guitars. But before he met Larsen he’d heard Dave Moore at a little northwoods folk fest, the Iowa songwriter and harp and button accordion ace who’d been down to San Antonio to study conjunto and brought it back north, mixing it with country and blues.
Whatever Dave had — that sunny rhythm and black Irish spark, purity of expression tumbling out like a Driftless creek, quicksilver joy and pathos — it was enough for twelve year-old Koskinen to wander the festival grounds collecting returnables at ten cents apiece until he had enough money to buy a copy of Moore’s seminal Over My Shoulder. This is what is known in literature as the operation of destiny.
Add in a long-term acquaintance with the wind chill factor, a hardscrabble childhood spread out along the 45th parallel, years spent swinging a hammer in various cities, a dozen Dylan records, and you land where the one-drop of reggae meets the two-feel of polka. The place where a peculiar Midwestern take on country rhythm collides with the shuffle and swing of rock ‘n’ roll. Where the blues coming upriver from New Orleans met the Scots-Irish ballad and the Hardanger fiddle, the Pentecost and the Presbytery. Koskinen rides the optimism in the upbeat — the and in one-and-two-and — and weights it with a finely calibrated emotional range, a sly sense of humor, and the swagger of a prizefighter.
He’s a lights-out guitar player and his band is as good as any band in the country. But he’s also a top-shelf writer, with a blade-sharp wit and love songs so real and tender they seem to transcend the form. I know of few writers whose relationship to their own landscape, in this case the rural north, is so elemental, and so integral. His songs feel like weather.
People know him in Minnesota, where most bar bands seem to cover at least one of his songs, but otherwise he’s still one of the best kept secrets in the country. He sings about an America that doesn’t get much play anymore, the one where the people at the bottom can’t quite get ahead, and where working people aren’t cartoon props in a culture war, but shrewd human beings living hard lives, and hard loves. His songs have the diamond-hard clarity and simplicity of Tom Petty, and like Petty, Koskinen can sing a literal statement without metaphor or ornament, and make it move like poetry.
The spiritual hunger in rock ‘n’ roll that came from blues and gospel is still a hunger in these songs, and if you listen hard, you can hear that lean coyote voice — wary, feral, full of fierce delight — lighting up the wee hours from somewhere out on the prairie. – Jeffrey Foucault”
Website: www.erikkoskinen.com
