Joe Cotten

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Joe Cotten was born in Panama City, Florida in 1991. He began playing bass at the age of 13, and moved on to guitar when he was 14. In a period of isolation after moving to Troy, Alabama, he began to focus on writing and recording music to express his feelings of alienation. He has been greatly influenced by bands such as Nirvana, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., and the Pixies, as well as more old-school influences such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors. He has a moderate vocal range and is capable of a variety of techniques, including death grunts, metal screaming, falsetto and crooning, but rarely uses these skills.

Joe Cotten’s lyrics tend toward the surreal and the fantastical, using otherworldly settings and inhuman personas to explore a very human sense of loneliness, a disdain for the self-appointed saints of this world, and the pain of an unrequited love. Many of his lyrics are taken directly from dreams. Contrary to some suggestions he does not use any psychedelic drugs to approach this writing.
Cotten’s guitar playing is a noise-flavored mixture of classical and blues, as colored by metal and hard rock. He employs a soft verse, hard chorus dynamic, and often slides into feedback-saturated, super-distorted soloing. His greatest influences on guitar have been J Mascis, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Steven Malkmus, and metal shredders like Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani.
Joe Cotten primarily uses Squier guitars, Fender amps, Digitech pedals, and is not endorsed by any of those companies.