Colin Cotter

Colin Cotter

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.