John Cico

ohn Cico is a songwriter's songwriter. He draws from the rich ore of America’s country and folk traditions, melding vivid lyricism, deft fingerpicking, and a lived-in baritone twang to forge a sound both intimate and enduring.

He conjures the bygone and burgeoning alike – from Blind Willie Johnson’s spectral moan and the bleak poetry of Townes Van Zandt, to the tender brawn of John Moreland and the vivid fiction of Sam Baker – distilling their spirits into something at once mythic and unmistakably his own.

Roving coast to coast, John honed his craft over many a ragged mile. He’s busked from the Venice Beach Boardwalk to the Boston Common, strumming through coffeehouses and backwater barrelhouses. He’s lived in trucks, tents, and tar-paper shacks. Slept on borrowed beds and stone floors. And as the dust of the road gathered in the folds of his clothes and sank into his bones, it seeped into his songs – leaving them worn and true, steeped in hard-earned wisdom and grace.

Stark, cinematic and written with a craftsman’s eye for lyric, John’s songs bear the mark of the miles that made them. Rooted now in South Louisiana, his long-awaited debut album, The Poison Kind, is slated for release in Summer 2025.