Cousin Wolf

Bio 1

Cousin Wolf is an indie-folk music project built around the songwriting of Matt Halvorson, a Seattle-based artist and activist who has been described as "a new-age storyteller with seemingly never-ending tales to tell." Nice, huh?

Featuring Andre Calderon on bass, Barry Cooper on horns, Benjamin Gore on bells and whistles, Jon Jupiter on guitar, Kenneth Maldonado on drums, Kelly Erb on violin, and Matt Halvorson on piano, guitar and lead vocals, Cousin Wolf’s songs will touch your heart and get stuck in your head.

The band is currently releasing a passion project called “Nine Innings” — nine songs about nine baseball players past and present. The songs are “nuanced, exploring the gray in a game that is often black and white and the players labeled heroes or bums.” With seven singles already out, stay tuned for the full album release later this season.

Bio 2 - by Louie Opatz

Listening to Matt Halvorson’s work since its humble beginnings, I’ve come to understand his music as one person trying to make sense of his time on this planet — all while reckoning with the hard-won truth that it makes less sense the longer you’re on it. 

Cousin Wolf songs are pleas and protests; they’re about rumination and ruination. I’ve never heard anyone else sing like Matt, and (as he knows from trying to teach me his songs) I’ve never heard anyone else write songs like him. His music is wholly original, which I think is music’s highest praise and, ideally, its ultimate goal.

That’s especially true of “Nine Innings,” which has been a low hum in the back of Matt’s brain for more than 10 years. He always came back to it, and he always had more to say. At first I was skeptical. 

But then I heard “Moses Fleetwood Walker,” the first track he wrote for the album, more than a decade ago. It was about baseball the way that Moby Dick was about a whale, to paraphrase an old saw. It told a complete story — not of Walker’s fielding prowess or baserunning acumen, but his personhood, his experience, his soul. It revealed what this project really was: using other’s stories to tell our own.

Love, death, anger, heartbreak — we all experience these, of course, but to so many of us who love sports, it’s easy to look past this immutable fact and bellyache about a player’s batting average with runners in scoring position or lack of hustle. 

We all contain worlds within us, whether we’re Dave Dravecky or Donnie Moore. But the inner lives of ballplayers often remain unexamined — perhaps for good reason. Everyone’s entitled to their privacy. But it also makes these men ciphers, and we the codebreakers trying to discover what makes them tick.  

The potent part of “Nine Innings” is how it humanizes these superhumans and makes, across nine songs that will quickly and stubbornly take up residence in your head, a powerful statement: we are all one, yet we will never truly know each other.

So how shall we live our lives? 

Louie Opatz
2.11.21

Music