Winona Fighter: DIY Nashville Punk
Punk isn’t the first genre that springs to mind when you think of Nashville, Tennessee. “Music City” as it’s known, is practically synonymous with country, not that it’s stopping WINONA FIGHTER from carving out their own space in the city. “I thought, why is there not more of [a punk scene] in what’s supposed to be Music City?” Vocalist Coco Kinnon chuckles as we catch up over Zoom prior to the release of their debut album, My Apologies To The Chef. “I figured, I’m just gonna start a project and we’ll figure it out as we go. Even if there’s not a scene – and we did. We played shows, but we would be on these all country bills, we’d play bars on Broadway. It was super uncomfortable,” she admits.
Despite that, or perhaps because of it, WINONA FIGHTER kept growing and kept touring, as Kinnon has always been serious about making it in music. From her very earliest memories of being introduced to the drums and FOO FIGHTERS, to when she ended up joining a band in high school. “I just wanted to be a rock drummer,” she explains. “That started this whole thing. I joined my first band, and one of the members was super into punk, so he introduced me to it. The first band I was in in middle school turned into a straight up punk band.” Growing up in New Hampshire, she quickly got acquainted with the Boston punk scene. “We were kids, 13-14, playing around a bunch of adults who would go work their blue collar jobs during the day and playing in punk bands at night. It was the coolest fucking community.”
Kinnon has played in bands right up until she moved from New Hampshire down to Nashville, ostensibly for college. “I moved here for school… and that lasted a year and a half,” she grins. Starting up what became WINONA FIGHTER, they initially went by COCO as the most important thing was to just write enough music to get out and gig. “I met Dan [Fuson, guitars] through a different project that I was meant to drum for, and he was meant to play guitar, and it just wasn’t working out. It evolved over time, Austin [Luther, bassist and producer] joined the band and we would release things here and there but mostly we spent all our time DIY touring, not really focusing on releasing music.” That culminated in their debut EP Father Figure, at which point they realised they’d probably need a band name.
“Austin came up with it. For months we thought, we just can’t fucking pick a name. Then one night, Austin said, ‘has anyone ever done anything with Winona Ryder?’ Because at the time you had MICHAEL CERA PALIN and BILMURI. So he mentioned WINONA FIGHTER and said, it’s feminine but aggressive, it fits the bill perfectly. I originally didn’t like it, but the next day I was writing it down, putting it on merch, and I realised, ‘this is fucking sick!’” Their ethos as a live band before all comes across not just in their last-minute naming but in writing their debut album My Apologies To the Chef, too. “We say we’re a live band before anything,” she explains, “so when it came to writing a full length, we asked ourselves ‘how do we envision these songs being played live? How do we envision an audience listening to these?’ Luckily Austin and I are writing all the time, so it wasn’t like ‘okay we have to write a full length, let’s sit down and do it,’ but we had all these amazing songs from over the past year, we put them all on the table and picked our favourites.”
That approach has served them extremely well so far; JUMPERCABLES is all attitude, leaping out of the speakers with 2000s pop-punk swagger, while You Look Like A Drunk Phoebe Bridgers rattles along with ramshackle energy and woah-oh choruses. Songs are anthemic without ever sounding overly poppy, instead picking hooks with a sneer. “We always write with WINONA FIGHTER in mind and, even if we don’t plan it to be on a record, that’s what makes us so cohesive, because we stay true to what we do,” Coco explains of the cohesion and energy that runs through their debut album despite it being written without a specific release in mind. There’s a relatability at their heart too, Coco admitting she comes from a long line of people with anger issues.
“It’s a perfect way to get more balance in life and this career,” she opines. “There’s a lot of frustrating shit and not good shit that can happen to you. Being able to write these songs and scream them at people, then have people scream them at me, it’s very peaceful.” That outlet gives her peace outside of the music, too. “It’s funny. There have been multiple times where people have been like, ‘Okay, I want you to know this person’s coming to a show. I want them to watch the show first then meet you. I have all the love in the world to give to everyone, but if I didn’t have this outlet, I’d be a little more testy,” she laughs. From songs about fake friendships and other emotional life experiences, WINONA FIGHTER gives them the space to not just breathe, but help breathe life into the Nashville punk scene.
My Apologies To The Chef is out now via Rise Records.
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