#106: Winona Fighter's name is no accident
"I like the name. I can live with it the rest of my life."
Listening to “You Look Like a Drunk Phoebe Bridgers,” it’s surprising Winona Fighter ever went by another name.
“Go ahead, I’ll let you take the first punch,” sings singer/drummer/guitarist Chloe “Coco” Kinnon.“’Cause honey I know ain’t got much / And you’re going down / In front of your friends / You try to get up / I’ll knock your ass out again.”
The suit a band with “fighter” in its name, though for several years the group simply went by Coco, Kinnon’s nickname. That the Nashville punk trio—rounded out by bassist/producer Austin Luther and guitarist Dan Fuson—eventually settled on Winona Fighter makes sense, given the fighting spirit that’s so prevalent on their full-length debut, My Apologies to the Chef.
Opener “JUMPERCABLES” only goes seven lines before mentioning beating someone up. On “HAMMS IN A GLASS,” Kinnon sings about sharpening knives and not being able to play nice. There’s the raging aftermath of domestic violence in “I’M IN THE MARKET TO PLEASE NO ONE.” It goes on and on—even in the songs whose titles aren’t in all caps—but you get the idea.
Ahead of the band’s tour, which kicks off tonight, Band Name Bureau spoke with Kinnon about becoming Winona Fighter, being a punk band in country music’s capital city, and causing confusion in the marketplace.
Band Name Bureau: Tell me about the process of going from Coco to Winona Fighter.
CK: I mean, we are artists, but we're also musicians—we just really care about our instruments and our craft and our ability. So a lot of our focus goes toward that, instead of maybe more the artistic-branding aspect. For a long time we were just doing DIY tours and playing in Nashville as much as possible. The thought was always in the back of our head, like, "Okay, eventually we're going to need to settle on an entity name." But yeah, we just went by my nickname from 2017, when I met Dan, until 2022, when we released Father Figure.
It's my band, but it's a band. I never liked going by my nickname, and then also it didn't fit. We would be on these all-punk bills, and it would be fucking Neckbreaker and then it's like…Coco. [Laughs.]
When we started working on the Father Figure EP, it was work on the EP and then also, “Okay, let's hunker down and figure out what we want the rest of our lives to look like in the form of a band name.”
BNB: How did you end up settling on Winona Fighter?
CK: Oh man. It was a lot of Austin and I going back and forth. We were a week away from having to submit the EP to DSPs. We probably have a whole Notes app with 30 band names in it.
BNB: I’m going to ask about those too, but go on.
CK: Austin got stoned one night. He really liked Bilmuri, so you think of the actor, but not really. He liked the pop culture reference.
He mentioned, “Has anyone done anything with Winona Ryder? She's badass. This is a badass, female-fronted project. She's very punk.” He brought up Winona Fighter, which has feminine elements, but then also this tough grittiness to it, which I think perfectly describes us as a whole.
At first I was like, "No." [Laughs.] The next day, I started writing it out, putting it on merch to see what it would look like. After maybe 12, 24 hours, it started to click with me. I was like, "Actually, I do think that's cool, and I do think that will work."
We’re not these diehard Winona Ryder fans. Or everyone asks if we're from Winona, Minnesota—Austin's from Minnesota, but he's not from Winona. So [it’s] just more of what is something that is going to catch people's attention, but also captures the vibe of our music in the band.
BNB: Do you remember any of the other contenders?
CK: Let me see. We wanted to name something Wrestling Moves. We did a whole second EP that we were going to call Wrestling Moves, and we were like, “Oh, well, what if we named the band Wrestling Moves?” It just wasn't the vibe. Austin really liked the name Beijing Beef, so you can probably get the vibe as to why it took so long to get a band name down. [Laughs.]
BNB: Beijing Beef, wow.
CK: We would see something and we'd be like, “Oh, is that a band name?”
For me, some of those punny names are really good, but then some of them are really bad. I was like, “How do we stay on the right side of this line?”
BNB: Do you get much feedback?
CK: For every, I think, negative feedback we get about the name, there's 10 or 15 people who are like, “Are you kidding me? That's a great name!” We were just in this thread where it was talking about pun band names or names of celebrities as band names, and it was like, “What's an example of a good one?” Because they're mostly bad. We were mentioned a couple times.
At the end of the day, again, I'm not as super-bothered with our artistic representation as I am the music and us being a live performing act. I like the name. I can live with the name the rest of my life.
BNB: That's the key, because so many times bands come up with names that were an inside joke. They never expected anything to happen with their band, and now they're stuck with a name that they hate.
CK: I think it's at the end of the Wasting Light documentary for Foo Fighters. The last thing Dave Grohl says is, “If I knew this was going to work out, I would've come up with a better fucking name.” I mean, you do go into this career hoping that it's going to work out and being kind of delusional, but there is that thing in the back of your mind that's like, “Well, this is the name, whatever. We'll see if this works.”
BNB: Is there a story behind Coco being your nickname?
CK: Yeah, it's funny. My dad is a Boston projects kid, and then my mom is from middle of nowhere, Alabama, very Southern. She wanted people to call me Chloe Grace. My middle name is Grace. She wanted that so bad. She wanted not just Chloe, Chloe Grace. But my dad started calling me “Coco” because I think that was maybe just easier for him. [Laughs.] Then, yeah, Coco just stuck. More people call me Coco than they do Chloe.
But I think the hardest thing for me when we were going by Coco was I enjoy having personal life and band separation. Definitely had we stuck with the nickname and dropped the EP and it getting all the traction it did, I think I would've felt like, "Oh, I don't know…" on a privacy level.
BNB: Because that would make you even more front and center.
CK: Yeah, exactly. I'm always into social media videos or X, Y, Z, but we do such a great job of being equal faces in the band—especially now that it is Winona Fighter instead of what my dad calls me.
You do go into this career hoping that it's going to work out, but there is that thing in the back of your mind that's like, “Well, this is the name, whatever. We'll see if this works.”
BNB: Growing up, were there any band names that you particularly liked or disliked? Have you ever avoided anybody because of their name?
CK: Oh, that's a good question. No, I've never avoided anyone because of their name. I've always been like, "Oh, does the band name fit?" My very first punk band, it was put together by this after-school program thing. The teacher named it Dragonfly based off of the Jimi Hendrix song. I was 11, 12, and I was like, "That's not going to work." [Laughs.] 'Cause we were playing punk music!
Any band names I really, really liked... I'm a huge fan of the Wonder Years. I think that's just such a nostalgic and classic name to have.
BNB: Nostalgic because of the Wonder Years as a concept or because it's referring to a TV show?
CK: I think as the concept. I do wonder if they named it after the TV show.1 I think that is a name that in any generation or any decade, it could be a band name. I always thought the Dead Kennedys was clever. That's a great name. I would say the one band... it's just so simple, but the Misfits. I like it, and I get it, and I listen to their music, but when I think of Misfits, I would attribute a name like that more to a Generation X band or a punk band. British, spiky hair…
BNB: Not gothy.
CK: Yeah. [Laughs.] I love '90s grunge, but all of those names are brutal. Well, Nirvana is a good one. That's a good, solid name.
BNB: Pearl Jam is not good.
CK: Pearl Jam's a little tough. Soundgarden. But I can imagine the conversation that went on that's like, “Okay, people have to know this is a band: ‘Sound,’ and then…something.” I think it's funny. I love knowing why bands are named the way that they are.
BNB: You've spoken quite a bit about coming up in the Boston punk scene and not finding a lot in Nashville when you moved there. Is it because it's such an industry town? Or because it was smaller than you were used to in Boston?
CK: Definitely because it’s an industry town, and there just was tons and tons and tons of country music. I would say now there's more of a scene, but it's still very industry- driven. I feel like in the Boston punk scene, it was very much for the love of it. People would come from their blue-collar jobs, their job at the utility company, play, and then go to bed and do it all over again. Whereas in Nashville, the authenticity is hard to find.
BNB: It’s more careerist, you mean?
CK: Yes. [Fewer] people doing alternative rock, punk, metal, whatever it is for the genuine love of it instead of the look of it. The scene's grown, but you still have to kind of search for those little authentic pockets.
BNB: In the behind-the-scenes video you made for “Wlbrn St Tvrn,” you mentioned that you felt disrespected as Winona Fighter found their place in Nashville. I was curious as to what you meant by that.
CK: Yeah, for a long time we were just trying to play as much as we could. We would be on all-country bills and then go up and do our thing, and the majority of the audience was like, "What the fuck is this?" But there would be one person who was like, "Oh, I listened to Blink-182 growing up. This is right up my alley."
But then I would say, post-2020 and the whole TikTok boom is when a lot of Nashville country artists and country writers started to see, "Oh, this emo/pop-punk resurgence is happening. Let's scoot over on this." Then we started to be able to put together more alternative bills. But because these people were popping off on TikTok and not necessarily doing the work by putting together these shows or playing these shows, it was definitely tough. There was a very cliquey alternative community for a long time in Nashville of “My video on TikTok got 500,000 views and I'm popping off as a rock person.” Then we would play shows with these people. The scene I grew up in, you learn respect.
BNB: Boston's no joke.
CK: Yeah. If you don't respect the people you're sharing the stage with or those around you, good luck getting back into this scene, my friend.
There were some bands we would play with multiple times, and every time they'd be like, "Oh, well, it was nice to meet you." It was like five times at one point. It got to the point where I called the band out, and obviously people don't like that. [Laughs.]
There was one show we did with these two more-TikTok-famous people. We brought out a hundred people to the show, and maybe there were 120 people in total at the show. But again, they just didn't talk to us, looked over us.
I don't get into the cliquishness or the drama of it. We're all trying to accomplish the same goal here. You may be popping off this way, but we're popping off this way, so we are equals, and we are all in this together. You're not hot shit. We're not hot shit. I think having any sort of ego in this genre or scene is just crazy—’cause it's so hard to begin with, to break through.
BNB: Even on the business side. I saw in one interview where you had a trademark declined because of Wynonna Judd.
CK: Yeah, we applied for, I think, [a] merch [trademark]. I don't know the specific one, but just all around, this is our name, we own this name. We got the decline letter back, and we were like, “Oh shit, probably [because of] Winona Ryder.” My attorney called the trademark office, and it was some kid denied us because of Wynonna Judd.
I guess the spelling doesn't matter, which is wild. It's a different genre. It's a different set of words. I think we just got some asshole kid who needed a power trip. We even appealed and we sent, I think it was, upwards of 50 pages of evidence.
BNB: There's no confusion in the marketplace.
CK: Exactly. Selena Gomez has a trademark. Selena the singer has that trademarked. There were a lot of examples of that, but we had to send our appeal to the same kid who denied us in the first place, and he immediately said, "Nope." So now we have to wait and try it all again.
BNB: That's so bizarre. Well, I always ask this of everybody I interview: Do you think it's better to have a bad name that's memorable or an innocuous name that doesn't attract attention?
CK: Bad name that's memorable, for sure. Now, I mean a bad name that's memorable in the sense of it's not harming anyone or any group of people or anything.
BNB: Why do you think that?
CK: Because people will still be talking about it. It's how I think when people leave hate comments. It's like, “Okay, well, you're still giving the post the attention it needs to thrive.” Some people would say Winona Fighter is a bad name, and it's just like, “Okay, well, it's still in your mouth.”
POST-SCRIPTS
You can find Winona Fighter’s tour dates here.
Winona Fighter is one of the bands I recommended when I was interviewed for Sound Opinions, which you can listen to here. I also recommend Ombiigizi, Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers, Bikini Trill, and…Fartbarf.
Also, hello all of you Sound Opinions listeners! Thanks for subscribing.
This is gonna be an active July at Band Name Bureau. Also coming soon is a regular issue with the usual nonsense and another one with an interview with journalist/critic Vish Khanna of the great music podcast Kreative Kontrol.
Apparently they did not. While I can’t find a quote from them about this, the internet tells me the name came from the title of a paper written by one of vocalist Dan Campbell’s teachers. But did the teacher take it from the show? In this eight-part podcast, I vow to get to the bottom of a mystery that