BIO

Avi Vinocur is a San Francisco singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose music roams these United States, spanning time zones and topographies, and arrives just when you need it most: a tune suddenly coming through clear over the radio during a long drive in the middle of nowhere. 

With a talent for crafting vivid, three-dimensional narrators and slice-of-life tales set in forgotten places, Vinocur has made a name for himself as a songwriter’s songwriter: a modern musician with an old soul’s gift for storytelling. A versatile performer and nearly lifelong guitarist — at age 15, obsessed with Jimi Hendrix, he sold his Magic cards to buy a Fender Stratocaster — Vinocur is best known for his work as a co-frontman of the acclaimed Americana band Goodnight, Texas; for his poignant blues-folk solo records; and, increasingly over the past two years, as an occasional collaborator and live background vocalist/mandolin player for Metallica. (His songs have also made appearances in places like the opening credits to Tiger King, the Academy Award-winning documentary Free Solo, Coors commercials, and Major League Baseball games. Vinocur has performed the National Anthem before the first pitch three times.)

Hindsight, Vinocur’s third full-length solo record, was released February 12, 2021. Written in the months after the pandemic shuttered the live music industry, it finds the songwriter staring down a year without a tour, adjusting to a life of staying put — and letting his imagination out to run. On Hindsight, Vinocur drops in on various lovers, castaways and vagabonds, then brings them to life through quiet moments and lonely spaces, effortlessly weaving together the personal, the historical and the fictional. The listener is transported instantly: A wooden house haunted by broken promises; a rusted truckbed covered in frost; morning light hitting empty beer bottles on the bedside table in a cheap motel. Elsewhere, Vinocur draws inspiration from John Prine and Justin Townes Earle, two venerable songwriters taken too soon in the tumult of 2020.

Recorded entirely on Vinocur’s iPhone in his apartment in San Francisco’s Sunset District, Hindsight echoes the intimate, demo-type sound of records by the Mountain Goats, Field Medic, or Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. It also feels a bit like rediscovering a cassette mixtape from a friend in an old glove compartment. All told, it captures the year that was — raw with anger and loss, determination and hope — and adds the quiet comfort of shared solitude: a message in a bottle, a voice through the static, a passed note from a songwriter’s quarantined living room to yours. 

Notes:

Avi’s work with Goodnight, Texas and The Stone Foxes was featured in major ad campaigns for Jack Daniel’s, Coors Banquet Beer and Budweiser Beer, Mercedes Benz, as well as the Academy Award winning National Geographic documentary “Free Solo” about Alex Honnold’s ropeless ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

Avi has performed the United States National Anthem at three San Francisco Giants games at AT&T/Oracle Park since 2017: once with Goodnight, Texas, and twice alone.

Also notably, Avi was tapped to perform backing vocals, mandolin, and guitar with Metallica at their 2018 “All Within My Hands” benefit show at San Francisco’s Masonic Theatre. The show was released shortly thereafter on February 1, 2019 as Metallica’s first official live acoustic record: “Helping Hands… Live & Acoustic at The Masonic”.

In September of 2019 he performed again with Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony at the opening of San Francisco’s Chase Center for their “S&M2” shows, which was subsequently released as a feature length concert film in theaters around the world. The full album was released on August 28, 2020 and debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200, #1 in Album Sales, and #1 on the Classical Album charts. The album’s first single “All Within My Hands” features Avi’s backing harmonies.

In March of 2020, as the world began to self-quarantine, Avi’s song “The Railroad” by his band Goodnight, Texas was featured for two minutes straight at the beginning of the first episode of Netflix’s hit show “Tiger King”, which shattered world streaming records garnering 34 million views in a 10-day period.

In August of 2020, Avi appeared alongside Metallica on The Howard Stern Show to promote the release of their album "S&M2", on which Avi does guest backing vocals. After being introduced by Lars Ulrich, Howard briefly interviewed Avi about his own band and his employment with Metallica as a studio tech, and then proceeded to intro Metallica as "Metallica featuring Avi". After the performance Howard quipped, "Well the good news is Avi can sing. The bad news is the band's lunch is ready and he's got to go pick it up."