Smokin' guitarist Erik Koskinen has been playing and recording his own style of roots-rockin' blues and American music since he was 14 years old. Best known as an ace guitarist for artists like Molly Maher, Randy Weeks, Koskinen is son of a Houghton College professor and grew up along Lake Superior on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. His parents took him to a lot of bluegrass and old country music festivals, and he became a fan of artists like Dave Von Ronk, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Dave Moore, Spider John Koerner, The Red Clay Ramblers. When his parents divorced, he moved to a mill-and-factory town in New York. Knowing no one, it was there he learned to play the guitar his father gave him before he left.

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Koskinen has worked as a truck driver, snow blower, construction worker, songwriter, producer, engineer, and multi-instrumentalist. He now lives and works in Minneapolis/St. Paul, with a regular Wednesday night gig at Nye's Polonaise Room in downtown Minneapolis. There he plays with Molly Maher as band leader for Molly Maher and her Disbelievers. “Best known as an ace guitarist (for Molly Maher, Randy Weeks) and a producer/engineer (Trampled by Turtles), Erik Koskinen should also be recognized as a masterful songwriter and rousing country singer... ” [Chris Riemenschneider - Star Tribune]

On a bleak, cold, frighteningly typical winter night in 2002, the last band I was in before Trampled by Turtles played our final show in a modified pizza restaurant-turned-venue in Duluth, Minnesota. The show ended, our band ended, glasses clinked cheers. We had plenty of help loading out our gear that night. So much, in fact, that someone walked away with my electric guitar and amp. They walked right passed the car where it was supposed to end up and went off into the frozen night, putting a giant period on the end of a what had been a short, struggling, but very necessary musical time for me. I was now fully unemployed and sleeping indoors only by the good graces of friends willing to share a couch, and the loss of my instruments was more than a little devastating. Of the few possessions I still had, the one that now gained top billing was a cheap acoustic guitar collecting dust in a small room on Duluth’s central hillside. A few other musicians in town had similar instruments collecting a similar dust and we started what was our first acoustic band, Trampled by Turtles.

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We’ve been able to stay together ever since and had some good fortune that escapes many more deserving and talented bands. Lately, though, the drums and amps ringing in the back of my head have been getting louder and the desire to play, write, and record in a way removed from what I’ve been up to has been getting stronger. Dead Man Winter was born out of these things. I’d been renting a studio in Minneapolis, and with the help of some amazing people I set to the task of making a record. My partner in the dirty and thankless work of recording was local engineer, songwriter, producer, guitarslinger, and master of the vibe Erik Koskinen. We spent countless blissful hours exploring guitars, amps, mics, and players in the worn-in beauty and sanctity of Realphonic Studios. Without a doubt, countless more hours could have been spent but you can’t begin work on the next record until you put out the current one, so here it is. The musicians that play on this album, Bright Lights, are dear friends – there’s not a one of whom would I’d hesitate to trust a song that I hold dear. In the end, the whole experience has reconnected me to that couch-surfing kid in Duluth trying to figure out what to do next in this big, terrifying, wonderful world and now, with a few more years behind me, it’s refreshing. [Dave Simonett, 2011]

I’ve taken to introducing Ashleigh Still as “the Eva Cassidy of Woodbury,” because her soul – even more so than her stunning voice – recalls the late great D.C.-area thrush’s depth of feeling. Which is to say that Ashleigh sings from a deep place informed by her hardscrabble experience as a gospel-trained, church-raised single mother of two whose fashion photos could grace the cover of either “Bust” or “Glamour.” (When asked how she knows so much about men, she recently said, “I don’t! It’s all imagination…”)

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But beyond her outer beauty and the wisdom that comes from the day-to-day struggle of making a living for her and her kids, there is an inner flame that burns brightly and has something to say; something about what it’s like to be a woman trying to dig out from the conformity of society, religion, and family. In that sense, Ashleigh also reminds me of Anne Sexton and Billie Holiday. Like those two express-myself-or-die classic talents, she manages to stop time when she opens her mouth/heart, and we’re all the richer for it. [Jim Walsh, Summer 2009]