About Colin

Colin Cotter is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, recording artist, and creative-at-large from the San Francisco Bay Area. He has played gigs from coast to coast in the USA, toured internationally in Canada, Ireland, and Spain, and teaches regularly at some of the top folk music camps in the country.

Colin grew up immersed in Irish, Finnish, and American folk music. When he was four years old, his mom had him pick up the fiddle and began teaching him to play the tunes she had learned as a child, building on several generations of a family tradition in Finnish folk music. He attended fiddle camp a few years later and fell in love with the Scottish and Irish tunes that quickly came to define his musical journey for a time. In addition to being a fine fiddler and singer, Colin is an accomplished self-taught guitarist, having taken to the instrument both for the practical purpose of accompanying himself singing and out of a deep affinity for sitting in the rhythmic belly of the beast when playing with fiddlers. Over the years, he has crafted a unique approach to expressing on the instrument that he brings to collaborations with artists from across the musical spectrum.

The main musical endeavors Colin is working on currently include songwriting, live solo performances, an edgy, electro-acoustic adventure with fiddler / violist Ryan McKasson that the two are calling Old Growth Graveyard, duos with fiddlers Sumaia Jackson and Adrianna Ciccone, sideman backing guitar work, and one-off collaborations. As a recording artist, he has released albums with the bands he co-founded, MAC (Perfectly Manufactured Reality, 2018) and A Thousand Years at Sea (4 releases between 2009-2014), and played guitar on several tracks for Sumaia Jackson’s 2019 record, Möbius:Trip.

Latest Videos

Here are a couple of Colin’s latest videos – enjoy! For more, head over to the video page or check out Colin’s YouTube channel.

Old Growth Graveyard

Longtime partners in crime, Ryan McKasson and Colin Cotter find themselves back in the thick of a creative collaboration spanning many years, bands, gigs, productions, late nights, tours, missed flights, fiddle camps, adventures, time away, and journeys home. Old Growth Graveyard is the most recent distillation of their artistic partnership, featuring McKasson primarily on viola with Cotter on electric guitar and voice. From the moment that they stumbled across the unique combination of the viola’s throaty richness, the electric guitar’s undeniable edge, and the human voice, the two were smitten and immediately took to the mixology of grafting together the electric and acoustic sonorities with a vengeance. When McKasson and Cotter are on stage together, you hear decades of friendship, collaboration, immersion in music, and shared passion for free expression form a foundation from which playful, evocative, unpredictable songs and tunes take flight.

OGG Website
Old Growth Graveyard
MAC

MAC

MAC is part of the natural progression of Celtic music as it has worked away into the American consciousness. Ryan McKasson (fiddle), Elias Alexander (bagpipes/vox), and Colin Cotter (guitar/vox) are all three well-versed in the Celtic music tradition. The music that they write and perform as the contemporary Celtic-Americana folk trio, MAC, reveals fiery personas tempered with artistry, finesse, and virtuosity as they draw from a deep well of innovative original music and lush arrangements of traditional songs and tunes. Released in 2018, Perfectly Manufactured Reality depicts this creative journey from its infancy up to the present moment.

Listen

In Collaboration

Colin has performed around the world and collaborated with a number of amazing friends and musicians, both in touring projects and as one-off performances.

Watch Video
In Collaboration