Jan 5, 20203 min read

A Decade of Coffis: 2019 Year In Review

We really outdid ourselves in 2019. Made a record, played more shows than ever, started a band, and we put off writing our year in review post for the entire year, and then some. A new record! How about that? Not bad, eh? But we have a really good excuse, I promise. We were really busy. Like really busy. Alright, not a great excuse, but let me explain.

On the second day of 2019 we started work on our fourth full length record. We went to 25th Street Studios in Oakland with Tim Bluhm at the helm as producer and worked for five days. Things didn’t slow down after that either. In February we got signed to a record label. Or we signed a record contract, or record deal, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know. But the truth is we signed with a label called Blue Rose Music. Alright, what next? Well, we continued work on our record with Tim Bluhm. We started a new band with Tim, and continued working on the record. We got a new van! And continued working on the record. So as you can see I wasn’t lying, we were busy.

Coffis Brothers photographed in Oakland, CA on July 18, 2019 ©Jay Blakesberg

As we enter a new decade we’ve done a little bit of reminiscing and looking back at the last ten years as a whole. So check this out. On a Tuesday in May of 2010 we played a show at a venue in Felton that, at the time, was called Don Quixote’s International Music Hall. We went under the name “Jamie and Kellen Coffis” and our friend Kyle Poppen joined us for about half of the show. Over the next year we played a handful of shows, I graduated college and eventually we decided to started playing more shows as a band, made a record and started calling ourselves “The Coffis Brothers & the Mountain Men.” The years after we did all sorts of things. We played hundreds and hundreds of shows, all around the country. Sometimes we played for a lot of people and sometimes we played for far less than a lot of people. Sometimes we drove really far to play for those people, or no people. My brother and I started this thing with no real grand plan. We had started writing songs and, at times playing music together, but I don’t know if we ever had a real conversation about starting a band that would play hundreds of shows a year and make records. In fact, to this day I don’t think we’ve had a conversation about that, but we’ve just kept doing it. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, or what we were even trying to do, when we started and we hardly know what we’re doing now, but we’ve learned a lot, we’ve gotten better (or at least we’d like to think we have) and we’ve grown up, if by no other metric than age. But we don’t need to go through all of this again. I think you know the story.

Coffis Brothers photographed in Berkley, CA on July 18, 2019 ©Jay Blakesberg

It’s been quite a year and it’s been quite a decade but who’s got time to stop and reflect? Thanks for all the support for the last year and throughout the whole decade whatever that was called (the naughts? the teens? the two thousand tens?). We are very grateful for all of you who may be reading this, for being a band, for having a label supporting us, and most of all, for having people who want to listen to our music and come to our shows. Happy New Year, folks. See ya soon.