Cousin Wolf is the indie-folk music project of Matt Halvorson, a Seattle-area artist and activist who has been described as "a new-age storyteller with seemingly never-ending tales to tell." Nice, huh?
Matt is obsessed with the art of songwriting, and most Cousin Wolf songs feature Matt singing and playing the piano or guitar.
A lifelong baseball guy, Matt grew up in Fargo, rode the bench on the baseball team at Augustana University in South Dakota for four years, and spent most of a decade as a vagabond before settling unexpectedly in the Pacific Northwest.
The band often features Kenneth Maldonado on drums, Andre Calderon on bass, Barry Cooper on horns, Kelly Erb on violin, Jon Halvorson on guitar, and Benjamin Goldenhour and Louie Opatz on bells and whistles.
The current Cousin Wolf project is an album called “Nine Innings,” a collection of nine songs about nine ballplayers being released as nine singles.
The songs are “nuanced, exploring the gray in a game that is often black and white and the players labeled heroes or bums.” Stay tuned for the full album out in May 2025, produced by Jeff Woollen of Raven Cries Studios.
Matt wrote and released a song a week during 2019 as part of the Rise Up Music Project, and selected songs from that year are being remixed and released gradually as well, beginning with “Winter” in late 2020. He is writing and sharing a song a month in 2025 as part of Rise Up Music Project 2.0, which you can find anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Cousin Wolf’s debut album, "Sermons" (released Feb. 2020), is “an 11-song offering packed full of songs played from the heart,” according to Northwest Music Scene.
Photo by Zeke Hill-Halvorson
