Photo Credit: Piper Ferguson
JOSIE COTTON “Ukrainian Cowboy”
“’Ukrainian Cowboy’ is basically about someone who’s had her heart ripped out, gone on a kind of journey and becomes the hero of her own story,” says the legendary and iconic singer/songwriter JOSIE COTTON about her latest single which gets released today, Friday, August 23, 2019 via Sympathy For The Record Industry.
Its video premieres via Medium.com who says, “Subtly reminiscent of Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’,’ the song blends flavors of country, pop, and new wave, along with tints of traditional Russian folk music, into a tasty sonic confection… Cotton’s voice, capable of sultry timbres, voluptuous purrs, and creamy textures, imbues the lyrics with smoky sexy tones polished to lustrous silkiness.”
The mod-styled video combines Josie’s kittenish playfulness with a Spaghetti Western by way of Tolstoy, which Medium.com describes as “A Fistful of Dollars fused with Dr. Zhivago, as Cotton, wearing a white dress, rides a horse across the screen, followed by playing her guitar caparisoned in a glitzy, kitschy cowgirl outfit complete with Dolly Parton-like big hair.”
“It was a cowboy song I could never seem to finish writing,” she explains. “But I was fooling around with it on the guitar one night with the news on in the background and when I got to the chorus, I heard the newscaster say ‘Russia’ at that exact moment. It hit me like a tons of bricks how rich it would be to make the song about that. And Russia is way bigger than Texas.
“So I brought it to Paul [Roessler, producer Screamers, Nina Hagen] who is a kind of musical genius and he immediately added this polka beat with tubas and drunken trombones and balalaikas. We were laughing so hard we were crying …also very Russian. I do remember at one point asking Paul if I could really say ‘the purge of Stalin’ in a pop song.”
Known from from her groundbreaking and massive hits “Johnny Are You Queer?” (1981) and “He Could Be The One” (1982), Cotton has been a fixture in pop music, especially in Los Angeles where she still performs shows and festivals. But instead of being a retro-artist, she’s breaking back into the music world full force with “Ukrainian Cowboy” as a sledgehammer. Imbued with Ennio Morricone-esque tones and a surf groove that serves as a foil to the oompah of the tubas (complete with gunshots and the sound of horses galloping), Cotton croons and purrs, “There’s a hole in my soul as big as Russia” with such New Wave flair that it merges then and now into a timeless amalgam of 80s and Aughts.
Hailing originally from Dallas, TX, Cotton swept the music scene with the international hit “Johnny Are You Queer?” which was included on the soundtrack to the seminal film Valley Girl along with several of her other songs.
Appearing in the film with her band the Party Crashers (as well as in 2006’s painful reality comedy Jackass Number Two and in 2009 on A Date With John Waters), Josie is known for her quirky stylizations and musical experimentation from pop to rockabilly, electronica, swamp, lounge, Western, garage rock and beyond. To date, she has recorded seven albums and has formed her own label, Kitten Robot Records with Paul Roessler where she will reissue her entire catalog in the near future
With live shows planned for the fall, including including September 7, I Want My Lost 80s Live festival at Downtown Las Vegas Event Center, Cotton is ready to reclaim her glory, but not without reason. “People seem happy I’m back among the living,” she laughs. “It’s great to be playing live again with such a killer band.Writing songs and recording have always been passions of mine, but working with the incredibly talented people I do is priceless.”
