Soundboard

Get Your First Glimpse of Aero Flynn

Eric Christenson, photos by Lee Butterworth |

Josh Scott of Aero Flynn (at the House of Rock, November of last year).
Josh Scott of Aero Flynn (at the House of Rock, November of last year).

You couldn't touch Amateur Love in the early 2000s. The band, made up of Brian Moen, Brad and Phil Cook, and headed up by frontman Josh Scott would routinely blow the doors off a packed Stone's Throw and shake a brimming House of Rock.

And then they stopped.

It’s been over ten years since Amateur Love played a show, and ever since, the ever-reclusive Scott has been – to put it modestly – laying low.

After years and years of dormancy, worry, and nothing, rumblings finally started last year about a finished recording from Scott: A project called Aero Flynn.

Eau Claire was treated to a rare Aero Flynn live performance in early November at the House of Rock along with Field Report and the promise of a nearby album. Now with a March 3 release date, a self-titled Aero Flynn debut is officially a go (via Brooklyn-based Ooh La La Records), with a starlit single called “Dk/Pi” to prove it.

Field Report’s Chris Porterfield took a front seat to the entire story in the early 2000s in Eau Claire and outlines it on the landing page of Aero Flynn’s newly launched website where you can also download the new single with an email address. You can read the whole letter at aeroflynn.org.

“I believe that this record, this long-awaited record, is quite seriously a life-or-death record,” Porterfield writes. “Josh had to make it to stay alive. And it must be heard in the context of deferred health, deferred relationships, deferred dreams, deferred healing.”

The record was produced by Justin Vernon, who collected a band of a bunch of Bon Iver members and friends like Adam Hurlburt, Mike Noyce, Sean Carey, Ben Lester, Brian Moen, and Dave Power to assist in both the recording and the ensuing live show.

But at the center of it is Scott; enigmatic, infectious, brilliant, weird, troubled, and easily “spooked” – as Porterfield puts it. Porterfield writes with a somewhat unsettling urgency that makes you really believe that this is it for Scott.

“I’ll never cast dispersion on what someone has gone through, but I do know this: Josh Scott has been maimed by rock and roll,” Porterfield says. “I pray that it can save him.”

Through his personal struggles and his fragile state of being, it seems Josh Scott is poised to either make it or break. If the infectiously spacy “Dk/Pi” is any sort of indication, he won’t go down without a fight.