Winona Fighter

ON THE NASHVILLE BAND'S DEBUT ALBUM, GUITARISTS COCO KINNON AND DAN FUSON SPECIALIZE IN GRUNGY POP HOOKS AND BRASH LEADS

- Jim Beaugez

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.’”