Kory Quinn

“Since starting this column a few years back, submissions from local bands have come via the usual snail mail and email...Kory Quinn was the first musician to pop up on my radar via a flier stapled to the box of the pizza I ordered. But darned if the music wasn't even tastier than the pepperoni. I gather the band migrated to Chicago from Indiana; that its biggest influence is Harry Smith's famous "Anthology of American Folk Music" and that it's gearing up to perform at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Okla., in July. Beyond that, the details of the Comrades are a mystery, but that's fine, because stark, haunting but brilliantly rendered songs such as "Shoes of the Dead," "You Ain't Coming Back," "Austin" and "Under the Gun" succeed because of their dark and twisted layers and the many lingering questions of that vaunted "old, weird America." ” - Jim DeRogatis (Chicago Sun-Times, Sound Opinions)

"However, Portland, OR singer Kory Quinn really was the festival slowburner, dishing out six performances or rare intensity and wry humour across the weekend. Quinn is a kind of contemporary hobo intellectual, who has been riding the rails of mixed US folk and country venues for five years, having been made redundant as a Latin high school teacher. Between road-worn self-penned material, old-time drinking songs and heart rending renditions of country tinged standards, the Mighty Quinn is someone to watch out for. It's a real credit to festival organiser Conor O'Donnell and his team that artists of this calibre can be introduced here. - Hot Press (Rolling Stone of Ireland)

Portland songwriter Kory Quinn has a homespun take on Americana. After spending over 270 self-booked dates on the road, Quinn still finds time to write and record new material. The just released second full-length album, At The End of The Bar, boils down red-dirt basics in a freewheeling roadhouse stew. He brings his acoustic art to Morning Shift. - NPR

“Joshua Smith slips quietly through the front door of a ramshackle Southeast Portland house where music spills from the kitchen. Guitar strings pluck. Harmonicas plead. Voices deliver bluesy folk lyrics laced with pain, grit, lies, loss and love. Kory Quinn and Jay Cobb Anderson sound beautiful, soulful and wiser than two musicians in their mid-20s should. They play and sing with such style and professional polish that Smith can't stop his smile from stretching cheek-to-cheek. One week into the cross-country recording journey he calls the American Music Preservation Project and already he's found gold. Pure, top-quality sounds performed by musicians who fall below big recording companies' radar and out of pop culture's spotlight are precisely what Smith hopes to capture as he pushes east from Portland this month. ” - The Oregonian

The front cover of Portland singer/songwriter Kory Quinn's new album, At the End of the Bar, is an action shot of a typical evening at the LaurelThirst Public House (maybe a little redolent of the Kinks' Muswell Hillbillies). A milling, moving crowd forms a blurry iris around a musician parked on stage, and the album has a similarly freewheeling roadhouse vibe. Quinn's assembled an impressive roster of local talent to play his twanging, beery songs, and the album effectively tells a story of how an impromptu community can be drawn together through the shared act of playing music. Quinn's songwriting is adroit and surefooted, offering sturdily constructed country, folk, and Cajun-tinged songs for his ensemble to really sink their fangs into. Expect that community to be fully evident tonight at the release show for Quinn's At the End of the Bar. NED LANNAMANN - The Portland Mercury

Portland songwriter Kory Quinn has a refreshingly homespun take on folk-country, a welcome sigh of relief in a contemporary market that bears an uncanny resemblance to arena rock with a southern drawl. Quinn boils it down to red-dirt basics on his most recent full-length album, At the End of the Bar, which combines the five songs on his previous EP, Angels and Outlaws, with nine new cuts for a jukebox-ready roadhouse classic.
Quinn colors within the lines for most of this album, but it’s not all trucker hats and Bud Light here. There’s some New Orleans trumpet on “Chaille-au-pied,” and mournful pedal steel mixes with upbeat harmonica on “Maverick.” And a traditional bluegrass fiddle medley rounds out the album. Two-step drinking songs like “Gonna Come Back For More” fit in well with tender barstool confessionals like the ballad “One of These Days,” all delivered in Quinn’s pleasant tenor. The songs are short and sweet—less than half even reach the three-minute mark—but they’re packed with clever lines, sentimental harmonies and twangy fills. All that makes them the kind of songs that hang around in your brain like honky-tonk regulars. - Missoula Independent

“[ROOTS] There's something to be said for just kinda nailing honky-tonk and folk tunes without attaching a lot of bells and whistles. That's what Kory Quinn does on his new EP, Angels and Outlaws. The five songs here are well-built and ship-shape, from the guitar picking to the tight-’n’-twangy vocal harmonies. Quinn's extremely tight rhythm section has jazzy undertones thanks to Blue Cranes drummer Ji Tanzer and busy local bassist Sam Howard. It's music built for fans of Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and other artists we only know from black-and-white photos and scratchy 78s, but it's a musical form tackled in such a simultaneously lively and respectful manner that one can't help digging on what Kory Quinn is doing. ” - The Willamette Weekly

All of the articles listed about me. -