Martin Koop

When it gets down to gritty, groovy, soulful songs about life, broken hearts, dirty laundry, trains, and best friends, nobody in Americana music today does it quite the way Koop does it. After a thirty year career of festivals, pubs, coffee shops, campuses, wineries, house concerts, and little theaters, Koop is emerging as a regional and national touring artist.

The iconoclastic, bearded, bespectacled, storytelling songwriter is on a hot streak. From his early beginnings as an Ohio coffee­house open­-mic­-night regular, strumming in Toledo’s dive bars in the early ’80s to his wild ride through thirty years of adventure and obscurity, Koop has remained deeply connected to the songwriting roots that first inspired him.

Koop cut his teeth in the folk clubs and on the sidewalks of Austin’s famed Sixth Street. Then Koop drifted to Nashville honing his craft in the writer's rooms and songwriter enclaves.

Notwithstanding frolics and detours to the two­-stepping heart of Texas and the alleys and edges of Nashville’s
Music Row, Martin Koop is inescapably a rust belt songwriter from the heart of it all, Ohio. His songs are culled from the steel mills, cornfields, highways, dirt roads, and fishing holes of the hardscrabble heartland.

Now emerging as a nationally touring Americana artist, Koop’s relentless pursuit of grit and tone and well crafted lyrics is suddenly finding it’s way to audiences in the nooks and crannies of America . . . in the pocket of her heart.