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Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that punk and hardcore and old roots music are both prime examples of this thing we call DIY. At their core, they’re about people with a story to tell who feel sufficiently inspired to set it to words and music. When you get right down to it, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between Woody Guthrie and Joe Strummer, and that’s where we can start talking about Tim Cossar’s solo work.
See, Tim’s been knocking around the Northeast for years now – you’ve probably heard one of his bands or seen him play if you’ve had even a passing interest in music over the past decade and a half or so. He was in Ten Yard Fight, he started the genre-redefining Give Up The Ghost, he’s been playing second guitar for The Hope Conspiracy for a while. He toured constantly. He filled in here and there, did guest spots, helped his friends out.
But as is usually the case when a music fan has been doing music for a long time, it was time to do something different, something that he connected with in a different way, something arguably more raw and honest than the work he’s done with other bands. And that brings us to his current solo recordings.
Like Avail’s Tim Barry, Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin and Hot Water Music’s Chuck Ragan, Tim has had a long-standing connection to folk, old country music and old blues, the trinity that people often lump together as roots music, which explains how Gene Autry, Lead Belly, Robert Johnson and the Carter Family can wind up rubbing shoulders, and it’s a natural connection. At its core, roots music – as opposed to the more modern inflections of it – is often intended to be one person making the best use of the talents and resources they have at their disposal to tell their story. Tim just came here through an electric six-string instead of an old Dobro or lap steel guitar.
And, more to the point, you can hear the similarities to musicians who’ve been dead for fifty years or more in his work – their influence resonates down the years. You can hear Dock Boggs and Son House in Tim’s mournful wails. The guitar forms sound like they’ve been passed directly down from 1930, courtesy of The Singing Cowboy who told Tim to play them in half-time. And the harmonica that comes in at the end of “Better Off Nowadays” sounds like nothing so much as a distant train heading somewhere lonesome.
And although Tim’s solo work is rooted in these traditions, it’s crucial to note that his music is not simply nostalgia – everyone who has ever played in any of these styles has had to make it their own and they have all brought their experiences to bear on it. In Tim’s case, he’s bringing the best part of 15 years spent in hardcore and punk to his songs, the constant sense of transition, of impermanence, of loss, of moving on.
But then again, those ideas have always been implicit in roots music, so what it eventually boils down to is simple, and I said it at the beginning – at their core, these forms are about someone with a story to tell and Tim ... well, he’s just at the beginning of his.
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