Focus on Canada: The Faces of Tony Kosinec
Interview with a truly great singer-songwriter you’ve probably never heard of (unless you're Canadian)
Sometimes you just buy a record for the cover.
I was on my knees in Circus Books & Music on Danforth Avenue, in Toronto, piling up dusty delights (great for my American exchange rate, terrible for my airline overage fees) when I came across a strange and gorgeous mosaic album cover. Tony Kosinec? Never heard of him. But the cover reminded me of the Who’s Face Dances and the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, with their multiple portraits by artists like Milton Glaser and Paul Davis, and I knew I had to have it.
When I got home and put this unknown Canadian record on, I was astounded. The songs were clever and complexly melodic, the arrangements profound and unpredictable. I loved every track, but especially “You Got Me Crazy,” a funky, horn-driven rocker that sways between swashbuckling strings and rugged guitar riffs. Kosinec’s high tenor sails over the music like a swift buffeted by spring breezes.
If it existed, I thought, Kosinec would be an emeritus member of what I think of as the Eccentric Professional Songwriter’s Union (EPSU), whose members might include John D. Loudermilk, Warren Zevon, Biff Rose, David Ackles, Van Dyke Parks, and Jimmy Webb. Like them, Kosinec seems to thrive on the internal tumescence of a song—its roiling structure, its surprise, the way an unexpected chord can shift the emotional weight of a lyric, the way a melody can be both inevitable and destabilizing. The song itself is the thing.
Very quickly I became obsessed with Tony Kosinec, the way we often do with artists who seem to appear out of nowhere even though they were there all along. I dug up his other albums, but biographical details were scant. The info I did find was pretty unusual: He was into Kabbalah and had written a Major League Baseball anthem.
There seemed nothing left to do but call Tony myself. An email exchange later, he graciously agreed to tell his story to Record Lung.
In some ways, the outline of what I learned was discernible in the music: a 1970s songwriter trying to navigate the crooked path between a behind-the-scenes tunesmith and a radio-driven star in a wholly insensitive record-biz environment. Indeed, years on, Tony was ambivalent about the very record I happened to adore. “Well, the first record I absolutely hate,” he told me from his Toronto home. “It was not at all what I wanted to make—it was completely overproduced.”
This was going to be interesting.
Kosinec was born in Leeds, England, and raised in Toronto. He started writing songs as a boy and was playing guitar in a rock and roll band by the age of fourteen. “My first band was called the Nomads,” he recounted. “Everybody had a band called the Nomads.”
In those years, Toronto was lousy with musicians, a lively scene within which Kosinec felt he was “pretty good—okay, at least.” Joseph Levitin, the father of Lee Oskar, the harmonica player for War, let the Nomads record in his home studio. By the late sixties, Kosinec had shifted from rock and roll to folk writing. One evening in the late 1960s, he went to the storied Yorkville folk club, the Riverboat, to see Eric Anderson. Out behind the club, Kosinec played some of his songs for Anderson. Listening in was Murray the K—Murray Kaufmann, the famous disc jockey, impresario, and self-titled “Fifth Beatle,” who had by then slunk away from WOR in New York for CHUM-FM in Toronto, where he had more creative freedom. “[Murray] heard the songs, and he said, ‘I like this. Come to the station tomorrow. We’ll see what happens.’”
Murray was impressed and sent Kosinec to New York. “It was storybook circumstances,” Tony says, “of somebody saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to make you a star.’”
And thus Kosinec was thrown into the musical hotbed of Greenwich Village in 1969. “It was a moving party of songwriters playing for each other,” he remembers. “A constant exchange. I don’t think many of them ever made it.”
Professional jealousy, he explained, was a driver. “You’d hear someone play a song and think, ‘That’s better than what I wrote this morning,’ and you’d go home and write something better.”
Songs were passed back and forth like a currency more reliable than money, and in that exchange—that perpetual, informal workshop—Kosinec closed the distance between thinking he was pretty good and understanding what good actually was.
Murray the K had arranged two auditions, the first at Buddha Records. When a young kid from Buddha picked Kosinec up in a limousine, he offered him a joint and launched into a disquisition on “vibes.”
“He says to me, ‘We’ve got to figure out what kind of vibes you got,’” Kosinec recalled. “‘That’s what Buddha is all about. Some people, they’ve got ten-buck vibes. And some people have got fifty-million-dollar vibes, and we’re gonna figure out which one you got.’”
He sat in the back of the limo thinking, Where the hell am I?
Artie Ripp, who ran the label, never showed up, so Kosinec hung around the office for a couple of days, just waiting. In the Buddha offices, people were talking about Neil Young. Kosinec hadn’t seen or heard of Young since back in Yorkville, when Young was in the Mynah Birds with Rick James.
“The detail that convinced me and my bass player that these guys were the real thing,” he told me, “was that Rick James was eating a piece of chicken while he sang.”
At Columbia, things were strikingly more professional. He entered the legendary Studio B, where Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon had worked (and where Kind of Blue was recorded), and, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, played all the songs that would form his first album.
The sheer fidelity of the studio was what struck him. Kosinec is a self-described “hi-fi freak” who has owned and operated his own studios for years, and he still remembers how the sonic architecture of Columbia’s facilities thrilled him. Things seemed to go well too, and the next day he had a meeting with none other than John Hammond.
“He was a nice man, but I think I insulted him. I told him I had read that he had written the tombstone for Billie Holiday: ‘You know, it’s interesting that you did her promotion, you know, both in life and in death.’... He looked at me, You little prick.”
Luckily, it didn’t scotch his record deal. But his first album on Columbia, Processes, broke Tony Kosinec’s heart. Intimidated by the recording process, he didn’t feel he could take charge of his own music. Columbia had hired the Canadian horn-based group Lighthouse as the backing band, and Kosinec felt they were too forceful for his fragile songs, pushing his voice into places it didn’t want to go. Even if Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles were his backup singers, the album also required, per the liner notes, consultation with a psychoanalyst. “The whole conception had been for a bare-bones record,” he says, “something that would honor the songs in their essence, and instead the arrangements overwhelmed everything.”
The mixing process didn’t go much better. At Columbia, records were mixed in small cubicles outfitted with Altec speakers. He could hear John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” being mixed in the next booth while Hal David and Dionne Warwick recorded in a nearby studio. “So it’s like the worst possible acoustic situation,” he says. “Huge speakers, little room, just blasting your head off, and they mix these songs in like 40 minutes.”
The resulting record sailed right into the swirling, fast-moving typhoon of pop music in 1969. Musicians everywhere had heard The Band’s Music from Big Pink and wanted that back-to-the-roots sound, which only italicized for Tony how his record had been overproduced. But Columbia believed in the record and even paid for some creative advertising in Rolling Stone.
To promote the album, Kosinec went on tour with Linda Ronstadt. He got a boost from a Billboard review of a show at the Bitter End: “Columbia’s Tony Kosinec, who shared the bill, seemed at home in the small club. His music is improving and his singing needs no improvement.”
He also spent two weeks opening for Richard Pryor.
“That was like watching a musician,” he says. “Timing, dynamics, all of it. Richard was brilliant. I watched him absolutely every night. [He] gave me my first hit of cocaine.
“I actually made him laugh,” he continues. “The dressing room in this place was terrible, and they had all kinds of boxes from a paper company called A.B. Dick. And he’s looking at all the boxes, and he says, ‘A.B. Dick. A.B. Dick. What is A.B. Dick?’ And I, in my brilliance, said, ‘That’s when you first discover you have one.’”
Back in Toronto after the tour, Kosinec began working on the second album, and he knew he wanted a change. “I didn’t want to repeat that experience,” he said.
That’s when Peter Asher became his manager.
Asher, of course, was the manager of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, and once a hitmaker himself with Peter and Gordon. “Peter understood the songs,” says Kosinec. “He listened. Then he got us this rehearsal hall in the Steinway Piano Building, which is opposite Carnegie Hall. So the three of us rehearsed in front of these beautiful, incredible windows up there, with the most beautiful piano you ever heard, looking right down at Carnegie Hall.”
The cinematic ache of this image—singing his heart out, looking down on Carnegie Hall—describes so much about Kosinec’s career, and about the delicacy and emotional range of his songwriting. The second record, Bad Girl Songs, is close-miked and stripped down, making the dynamics and sensitivity of his writing impossible to miss.
In “I Use Her,” a stuttering form shows just how unusually self-aware Kosinec was about his role in relationships:
With my band around her neck, and my anklet round her leg
She is bound not to forget, that I use her… as an anchor, for my moving movie
Every word that I am signing I have stolen from her kiss
And they all sound like nothing when I treat that girl like this:
[groovy guitar lick]
Bad Girl Songs came out in 1970—alongside Ladies of the Canyon, After the Gold Rush, Tea for the Tillerman, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Moondance, and Sweet Baby James. To my ears, Tony’s album could well be among the Elgin marbles on that Acropolis of singer-songwriter masterpieces. But its shifting rhythms and enjambed lyrics may have lumped it with the more eccentric albums of the period, like Andy Pratt’s Records Are Like Life and Colin Blunstone’s One Year, both of which feature gorgeously whispered vocals and tessellated lyrical shifts. Neither, like Bad Girl Songs, sold.
And Kosinec’s touring arrangement didn’t help matters. Columbia sent him on a grueling tour opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears. “The type of music from the first album would have been really appropriate, because Blood, Sweat & Tears was like Lighthouse,” he says. “But instead I was facing 20,000 people with songs fit for a folk club. As a result of those couple of months, I felt like, ‘This is not a way to live.’”
Tony returned to Toronto and made more albums. His biggest success came in 1973, when his song “All Things Come from God” reached number 10 on the Canadian pop charts. His later records are the work of a songwriter who had learned, through considerable frustration, how to protect his songs from the people who were supposed to be helping him make them. Looking back, he concedes, he might have been happier had he stayed behind the scenes: “Tin Pan Alley. The Brill Building. Writing songs for other people. Perfecting the architecture of the thing itself—the songcraft.”
Like so many brilliant songwriters of the period, Kosinec ended up making money writing commercials, including the Toronto Blue Jays theme song, “OK, Blue Jays.” The fine craftsman in him found clever pleasure in that process, too.
Is that a fly ball, or is it a seagull?
Coming in, from the lake, just to catch the game
It’s the last inning, our guys are winning
Dave’s put down a smoker, a strike and you got no doubt (You’re out)
What do you want? Let’s play ball
“It’s fascinating,” he said, “how to make the connection and the memorability and the legitimacy of a pop song in 30 seconds.”
“I still love being in it,” Tony muses. “I still love the process.”
The songs of Tony Kosinec accumulate—precise, surprising, built to last—and circulate in their quiet way through the bins and radio spots and algorithms, waiting for the next person to stumble across them sideways and think, Where has this been all my life?
Thanks, Tony.
Well done!
This is awesome. Tony is my dad—I grew up hearing some of these stories but am always surprised when others reveal themselves. Rick James singing and eating chicken is a new one.