B-Side Guys

Cozi gave her father, Ezra Vancil, a Dylan commemorative magazine, and somewhere in the pages, they found a song. “Bobby Zimmerman” tells the story from Echo’s perspective, Dylan’s teenage girlfriend, watching him pack up his Danelectro and leave Duluth for New York. It’s a smarter angle than another song about genius: this one’s about the girl left behind, playing records on the floor, doing the quiet math of what she lost when the music got found.

The lyrics mix literal Dylan references (his Danelectro, Woody Guthrie, Echo herself) with the kind of poetic reflection that the best character-driven Americana does well. “I’m the California / You’re the New York Island” borrows Guthrie’s geography to reframe the distance between two people as something vast and inevitable. The repeated “what if that boy from Minnesota / never left his girl alone” sits at the song’s emotional center, not bitterness exactly, more like the quiet math of roads not taken. Cozi’s lead vocal and harmonica carry the intimacy, Ezra’s acoustic and harmonies adding the generational texture that makes the duo’s collaboration feel genuinely lived-in.

Produced by Aaron Thomas with Lori Martin on bass and Sam Romero on electric, the track is rustic and warm without being precious about it. For fans of Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris, that combination of story-richness and unpolished recording captures something most studio-perfect folk misses. Echo never got her name in the history books, but she got this song, and that’s a reasonable trade for a father and daughter to make together.