Q: Why is there a double “n” in “Kinnfolk”?
A: That’s easy…it’s because we’re punny people! Our names are Josh and Julie Kinn. Kinn (our name) + folk (our genre) = Kinnfolk.
There’s one more layer, too, and that’s the meaning of the properly-spelled word “kinfolk”. Some of you might remember that, waaaaay back in the day, our band had a different name. It was a reference to a beloved fantasy book, and we loved it, but many people found it difficult to pronounce. So, around the fall of 2019, we started shopping around for new names. We tried all kinds of tactics: band name generators, referencing phrases from songs or Irish tune titles, writing various words on flash cards and shuffling them around on the table.
We actually came up with “Kinnfolk” pretty early in the process, but there was one hitch: we weren’t “kinfolk”—family—at that time. In the fall of 2019, we were still only dating. Julie used to joke, “This name would be perfect, if only I were your sister.”
Josh had a better solution: a romantic proposal in front of some foggy mountains.
And so, we decided to give our band the family name: Kinnfolk.
If you're the kind of person who enjoys archival material, we actually have a video of the very moment that we announced our new name on stage! We were playing on the famous Floyd Country Store stage on September 21, 2019. We'd been engaged for a little under a month...