Interview: Erik Koskinen
If he hadn't come down with a respiratory disease more commonly associated with pigs, Erik Koskinen might not have a music career.
The housing crash of 2008 forced the singer/songwriter — who’d made his primary living as a carpenter — to take a job as a steelworker.
“No one was building houses, so I helped rebuild the city incinerator in Minneapolis,” Koskinen says. “It was pretty gross — rats and trash everywhere — and I ended up with swine flu. And, man, it was heavy duty. I got pneumonia and had to quit.”
Word got around that the in-demand producer and guitarist had some time on his hands, and Koskinen’s phone started ringing off the hook. “All these people realized I was available to work on music with them, so I got so busy that I never went back to that job,” he says.
Since then, he’s produced or engineered nearly 40 records for artists such as Charlie Parr and Trampled by Turtles, as well as backing fellow Midwesterners Jeffrey Foucault and Pieta Brown on tour and in the studio.
Koskinen also has released five original albums under his name (including the new Down Street/Love Avenue). The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls him “the best country songwriter in Minnesota,” though he prefers to brand his agrarian sound and hardscrabble storytelling as “American roots music.”
“I know of few writers whose relationship to their own landscape, in this case the rural north, is so elemental, and so integral,” Foucault says in a press release of his creative partner, who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. “His songs feel like weather.”
Ahead of his first-ever run of shows in North Carolina — including a Thursday, June 27, headlining stop at The Grey Eagle — Koskinen spoke with Asheville Stages from his home on a farm just outside Saint Peter, Minn., about how the Midwest has shaped his music and why he’s excited about his shows in the Old North State.
Jay Moye: Where am I catching you today?
Erik Koskinen: I’m about to head to Spring Green, Wisconsin. We're playing tonight at a place called the Shi-tty Barn. I think it's a shitty barn on the outside, but with good food, a good PA, and a good crowd. It sold out like a month ago, so we’re excited.
JM: Speaking of barns, you recently got to play Levon Helm’s barn studio in Woodstock [with Pieta Brown]. That's not a not-so-shitty barn.
EK: Not shitty at all! It's a remarkable barn. The whole thing is pretty great — the feel and vibe, and also the build quality. I used to be a carpenter, so I always look at that stuff when I walk into buildings.
JM: It’s on my bucket list. Never been to the Hudson Valley. Almost made it there last summer, but it didn't work out. One day it will.
EK: That's what I've been saying about Asheville for 20 years.
JM: You’ve never been here?
EK: Never been to Asheville, and never played in North Carolina.
JM: You primarily tour in the Midwest?
EK: Yeah. I've done a bunch of tours. I just did a thing out in New England, and the last couple years I’ve played in California, Montana, Colorado — places like that. But to be able to make a living, my home base is definitely the Midwest. For instance, this weekend we’re going out for three days; we’ll make money and I’ll go home. My music has been based out of the Twin Cities for the last 17 years. I’ve lived all over the country but have been in Minnesota longer than anywhere.
There's a Duluth, Minn., band called Low. I played with them, and opened for them on a tour in Europe. I tend to do that a lot. I’ll play guitar with someone, then open for them on the same tour.
JM: A package deal. You do that sorta thing with Jeffrey Foucault?
EK: Yeah, he’s got a new record coming in September. So we're doing a different tour the first half of each month between September and January, starting with New England. The shows will be co-bills, and his band is killer. He’s got the drummer from Calexico, John Convertino, and Eric Haywood, the steel player who's played with everyone from the Pretenders to Jakob Dylan.
JM: I think Eric lives in Raleigh. He’s a hell of a musician.
EK: He was living there for a while, but not anymore. He definitely is a hell of a musician and also the ultimate sweetheart of a human.
JM: Your songs reflect a decidedly Midwestern sense of place. What about your writing and sound channel where you live?
EK: It's the world I grew up in. My grandpa owned a bunch of bars in a part of Flint, Michigan, where people got off the late shift working at the Buick plant and they went to happy hour at seven o'clock in the morning. His bars were always in rough neighborhoods, so those are the people I grew up with — the not-as-pretty side of the world, I guess. And I’ve always had construction labor jobs.
JM: That seeped into your writing early on?
EK: It did. Writing for the underdog has kind of been my thing, though I never did it on purpose.
JM: How has your experience producing records for other artists, as well as your work as a sideman, shaped or influenced your music?
EK: I’ve learned what not to do as much as what to do. Everybody has their own version of how they hear and play music. The excitement of trying to figure out somebody else's thing just changes the way you play. To me, music is so reactionary, so you get another band in the studio or a different band on stage or in a barn — or whatever the case may be — you naturally react to the other musicians, the audience, or both.
I’d say Al Sparhawk from Low is a musical genius. I've worked with him just enough to see that happen. He comes at stuff sideways. Oftentimes, that would not be natural to me. Learning from someone like him, just by being on stage with him, is a thing, because otherwise it's really easy to get stuck in the ruts and rabbit holes of doing the same thing over and over again. I find it to be incredibly boring to play the same exact notes every single night.
JM: You and your band have a run of shows coming up next week in our region. In addition to The Grey Eagle here in Asheville, you’re playing in Flat Rock and Franklin [N.C.], Travelers Rest [S.C.] and Johnson City [Tenn.]. Aside from the shows, what are you excited to do here?
EK: Eat some good food, see the mountains and get out for some hiking. I grew up partly in northeast New York, in the Adirondacks. The woods are a little bit different, but the scenery is probably similar.
JM: Well, your music is right at home here. I think you’ll dig it.
IF YOU GO
Who: Erik Koskinen Band with Caromia and Rahm
When: Thursday, June 27, 8 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $15
(Photo by Darin Kamnetz)
