The new album was produced by “The Godfather of Americana” Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, (Joan Jett, Del-Lords, Steve Earle & The Dukes) and producer (Bottle Rockets, Jimbo Mathus, Yayhoos, Sarah Borges). It features guest vocal appearances by Tommy Stinson(The Replacements, Guns & Roses), Sarah Borges, and musical backing Baltimore power pop phenoms Starbelly.
Fort Defiance—recorded at Ambel’s Cowboy Technical Services in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—is the follow up to 2023’s critically acclaimed solo debut Appalachian Gothic, which was hailed by Americana UK as “the Appalachian Tommy” and garnered a 4.5 out of 5 Star review by American Songwriter, which called the album a “mesmerizing, major work.”
The son of four generations of coal miners, Erik grew up along the banks of the Monongahela River in West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania, and recently relocated to Austin from Washington, DC. He came of age on The Clash, X and the Sex Pistols, but never truly escaped his Appalachian roots. From the cowpunk on-ramp of The Blasters, The Beat Farmers, Jason & the Scorchers, and Dwight Yoakam, he wandered upstream along the Hillbilly Highway until he rediscovered Johnny Cash and George Jones—artists he’d listened to as a kid in the cab of his Uncle Jack’s 18-wheeler.
Erik (under the nom de plume Cletus McCoy) is the longtime frontman of The Surreal McCoys a cowpunk “hipster doofus band” (as Mojo Nixon dubbed them) with two albums under their belt that—bolstered by airplay of the mashup single “Whole Lotta Folsom” on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country—enjoys 50K monthly listeners and has collected over 3.5 million spins on Spotify.
