Benji Cossa

An indie singer/songwriter whose spacy, twangy songs nodded to artists like Devendra Banhart, Sparklehorse, and the Mountain Goats, Benji Cossa slowly built a following throughout the late '90s and early 2000s thanks to his prolific nature as a songwriter and an appearance on the soundtrack of 2003's Zero Day. Cossa started writing tunes in 1995, during his sophomore year of college. He snagged a spot on a Krebstar Records cassette tape compilation one year later and went on to release his first album on that label, a cassette tape-only release with the wry title Cossacabana, in early 1997. Several more homemade albums and compilation tape appearances followed over the course of the next seven years, including the split 7" Rollacossa, the 4 for Tour cassette, and an appearance on the Magic Marker Records comp Can We Still Be Friends. Up until this point, Cossa was more or less on the unknown end of the indie rock spectrum; he didn't have a label and was still recording many of his tapes on his own. This changed in 2003, when he was approached by director Ben Coccio and commissioned to write a song for Zero Day, a film loosely based on the Columbine High School massacre. The highly controversial film more or less boosted Cossa out of the comp tape underground — Magic Marker released an all-Cossa comp, Benji Cossa's Vault, Vol. 1 in 2005, and the artist released his first full-length studio effort, Between the Blue and the Green, on Serious Business in 2007.