Winona Fighter have come a long way, most of it by van and trailer, since the days when they were handing out flyers outside a music festival they weren’t even playing. But as it turned out, the Nashville-based punk band’s old-school do-it-yourself approach paid off, as they learned how to make the best of whatever circumstances came their way.
“We have been DIY touring since we started,” said vocalist Coco Kinnon, who also plays rhythm guitar and is the band’s primary songwriter. “We’ve played to zero people, one person, just our parents. And then, yeah, an amphitheater of 20,000 people. And whether it’s that one person or thousands of people, we play exactly the same because we just love to do it.”
It was in 2023 that Winona Fighter got in front of that aforementioned large crowd, when the band jumped on a last-minute offer to open for the Offspring in Salt Lake City, a half-country away from Nashville.
“I grew up listening to The Offspring, and you can probably hear some of their influence in our music,” Kinnon said. “We had less than a week’s notice to get there, so we had to get a lot done in just a few short days. And then getting up there in front of 20,000 people, you really can’t anticipate it until you’re up there. But it was so worth every anxiety, every penny, every stress.”
On Friday, the band will play at Archer Music Hall in Allentown.
At the following South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, the band performed Offspring’s “Self Esteem” during an after-midnight set in a considerably smaller venue.
Following their self-released “Father Figure” EP — which Kinnon, bassist/producer Austin Luther and lead guitarist Dan Fuson recorded in Luther’s home studio — the group signed to the indie label Rise Records.
The resulting full-length album, “My Apologies To The Chef,” is a winning combination of unbridled energy, riff-heavy arrangements, and solid songwriting. The punk-metal “Kerrang!”magazine praised its ability to “turn trauma, anxiety and mental health troubles into something both fun and cathartic to sing (or shout) along to.”
Among the album’s highlights is their “You Look Like a Drunk Phoebe Bridgers” song and video, which comes complete with skatepark, Marshall amps and a “stay the hell away from me” chorus.
None of which has anything to do with the indie folk artist in its title. Kinnon says the song is actually a condemnation of a friend’s manager and the record industry in general. When it was finished, they still didn’t have a name for it, until fate, or something like it, intervened.
“I was at a bar later that night, completely sober, and a guy came up to me and was like, ‘Has anyone told you you look like a drunk Phoebe Bridgers?’” Kinnon recalled. “And then he walked away. I was a little offended, but then I thought, ‘That’s an extremely poetic thing to say. I’m gonna use that as the song title.’”
A Boston-area transplant who recently turned 28, Kinnon became obsessed with ‘90s rock and grunge at a very early age.
“I remember specifically this radio station my dad would put on that had a show called ‘Greg & The Morning Buzz,’” she said. “And whenever they would go to the music sections of the show, the 4-year-old me would be bobbing my head and telling him to turn it up. No idea what they were singing about, or anything else that was going on. But yeah, I’ve been drawn to grunge and rock and pop music ever since I was a little girl who was kind of just confused all the time about everything.”
It wasn’t long afterward that Kinnon started playing her first instrument. “I would be the hired drummer for a lot of bands, and I would just be going crazy back there, like freaking Animal from the Muppets,” she said. “And I would wonder what it would be like to be up there at the front of the stage. And it turned out I really liked singing and performing and writing my own music.”
In the studio, Kinnon gets to have the best of both worlds. She plays all the drum parts, something she expects to keep doing for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, the band has plenty to say about the virtues of their label, which unlike many, has a roster of bands that don’t fit rock’s stubbornly all-male formula.
“Part of it was the amazing female fronted acts on it, like the Distillers and Spirit Box,” Kinnon said. “But also, the thing that I was really drawn to about Rise was they understand how close to my heart it is to keep being a do-it-yourself punk band. And I think it’s so cool to see all these women artists just crushing it, and playing these amazing rock shows, and not really giving a damn about what anyone else thinks.”
All in all, the transition to being on a label has been virtually seamless.
“We have a team that believes in what we’re doing, so much so that they’re like, ‘OK, yeah, just let us know when the record is done,’” said Kinnon. “And I don’t think you’d get that type of energy from a huge label. It’s like, OK, then let’s have fun with this. And let’s remember why we’re here and not, you know, overthink it to the grave.”
Bill Forman is a freelance writer.
