Coco Kinnon was just another bored young punk rocker lost in the rudiments of guitar and learning songs like Blackbird and Stairway to Heaven when she decided her guitar lessons were going in the opposite direction of her interests.
“It wasn’t for me,” Kinnon says. But the owner of the guitar shop where she took lessons heard something that liberated her playing. “He was like, ‘You play guitar like a drummer,’” she says. “That shifted my mindset to, ‘Oh, I can play guitar and just lay it down.’”
The shop owner was right – Kinnon was a drummer first. Now, as the frontwoman of the Nashville-based pop-punk band Winona Fighter, she’s a dual threat who bashed the skins and laid down slamming out guitar riffs on the band’s 2025 debut album, My Apologies to the Chef.
After moving from Boston and its famed hardcore punk scene to the more placid home of country music, Kinnon and lead guitarist Dan Fuson put together Winona Fighter and began playing showcases at bars off Lower Broadway, where country ax-slingers and singer-songwriters vie for attention. The experience spun them right back to their punk roots.
“It makes you lean into what makes you better as opposed to, ‘Let’s try and retrofit what we have into what seems popular,” she says. “If we want to play a super-fast song, that’s great. If we want to have a song that’s a little more mid tempo, let’s do that and play ’em fucking balls-to-the-wall.”
Live, Kinnon and Fuson flip the script on the search-and-destroy punk rulebook by eschewing half stacks and running their guitars through stomp boxes directly to the house mix.
But even when running a quiet stage, they have plenty of guitar bite – metalhead Fuson, who culls ample squeals and solos from his EVH model guitar over Kinnon’s caffeinated, grungy Jazzmaster riffing, makes sure of it.
“Some players will talk about wanting it to be a battle when they’re playing the instrument, like, I want it to hurt playing this guitar,” Fuson says. “I’m like, no, I want to make this fun. And I’m driving a sports car.”
- My Apologies to the Chef is out now via Rise.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
