SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
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Erisy Watt : Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Portland-based Erisy Watt will release her sophomore album Eyes like the Ocean on April 1 via American Standard Time Records. This is the highly anticipated follow-up to her 2019 debut hailed by No Depression as “an exercise in what contemporary folk today sounds like at its peak.” With this new offering, Erisy returns with a lovingly crafted, sophisticated collection of songs, recorded live-to-tape and produced by Y La Bamba’s Ryan Oxford.
Erisy’s sound reliably alludes to iconic vocalists of the 1960s, but here, finds a more fitting home in the vintage-tinged indie ether of Bedouine or Julie Byrne. Her vocals are intimate and alluring, an artful alternation between soothing whispers and gentle howls, backed by an instrumental bigness that evokes windy mountainscapes and piercing blue skies. Throughout Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy calls upon the expanse of earth and sky to navigate life as an adult woman—satiating restlessness, finding connection, and fostering that ever-elusive sense of self that allows one peace.
Erisy Watt grew up in Nashville, but it wasn’t until she left the city of music for college in California that she began writing her own songs. Both of these formative settings are present in her creative instinct—Nashville’s knack for a timeless melody, California’s bewildering vastness and dusty free spirit—but upon these sonic bones lives a body of global adventure. Erisy is an environmental professional with a deep fondness for nature, and has spent time in eclectic locales like Nepal, Thailand, and Hawaii, most often in rugged, remote wilderness. She approaches the music profession with a similar sense of purity; she once toured Europe on foot, banjo on her back. This wide-open way of moving through a capacious planet enlivens Erisy’s music with true troubadour soul. Her songs spring not so much from one place in particular as from a series of well worn travel journals.
This stretch of inspiration calls for acute musical capacity, and fortuitously, Erisy no doubt knows what she’s doing. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, she can walk up and down a fretboard in gymnastic Jazz chords, craft complex guitar patterns in a wide range of tempos, and masterfully press her vocal performances past previous limits. In the midst of recording her debut album in 2018, Erisy underwent surgery to remove a problematic polyp on her vocal chord. While the diagnosis and procedure proved traumatic, Erisy discovered a new vocal freedom in the healing process. Today, she describes the feeling of being uninhibited, both physically and creatively, as integral to her artistic evolution. The transformation is most palpable on crossover hit “Big Sky,” one of Erisy’s oldest songs, which she polished to shine.
On Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy lets her newly liberated talent shimmer, but her real art is in connection: tracing the invisible vessels between an ocean’s black depth and a mountain peak’s twinkling tip, tracking the slow immensity of glacial paths to the monstrous canyons they carve. She ties her insides to the outside, taking tips from the cosmos, a naturalist with a knapsack of stardust, making luminescent the dark parts of her path, finding a way forward.
The Apricots: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
The Apricots, an emerging Portland project, is serving indie-rock with funky, soulful influences. They have fun exploring cracks between the genres they love and growing sound between them. Spend a night with the Apricots and you’ll walk away with a pep in your step and a little teeny tiny sparkle in your eye, hopefully wondering “who the hell was that?”
A special evening of local songwriters at The Sou’wester Lodge.
Jonah Sissoyev and Anna Hoone: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Andrew Victor: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Throughout his career Andrew Victor has shared bills in the U.S. and Europe with Sharon Van Etten, Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, Tomo Nakayama, and Damien Jurado. He has been a core part of local scenes in Brooklyn, Seattle, Joshua Tree, and Rhode Island. His new studio album Recovery arrives 11/4/22.
Zoe Winter: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Arran Fagan: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Praised for his introspective lyrics and vivid storytelling, Portland-based folk artist Arran Fagan has garnered a following in his native Oregon with his uncanny ability to weave the personal and universal. After getting his start in the grassroots music scene of Southern Oregon, Arran has spent the greater part of his life pursuing music, creating wistful and evocative songs that explore themes that connect us all—loss, addiction, change, and the endless passage of time.
With heartfelt lyrics and rich instrumentation that has garnered comparisons to Josh Ritter and Nathaniel Rateliff, Arran has spent years in the NW folk music scene, getting his start playing coffee shops and house shows for college classmates and eventually going on to open for Northwest favorites like Leif Vollebekk, HorseFeathers, Kris Orlowski, Matthew Fowler, and Jeffrey Martin.
In 2015, Arran recruited fellow University of Portland students Jack Pfeffer and Jonathan Wiley, and the three worked to perfect a sparse, melodic sound influenced by their individual backgrounds. Arran’s 2018 album “Weight of Time” debuted to a sold-out release show and was followed by a West Coast tour. Praised by outlets like half&half and Elsewhere for its powerful stories, cathartic songwriting, and ability to “[weave] concrete images and abstract feelings,” “Weight of Time” saw Arran establish himself as a surefooted and exciting fixture in the Portland folk scene.
Sama Dams: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Few bands command the unexpectedly fine line that divides tension and release like Sama Dams does. And it’s no wonder: songwriters Sam and Lisa Adams have been playing music together for over a decade – as long as they have been married – developing a creative forthrightness that sometimes feels voyeuristic. Taking cues from jazz, R&B, new wave, indie-rock, and classical art song, the alt-rock trio weaves a sensuous musical fabric that is distinctly theirs.
Much like the Dirty Projectors or Thom Yorke, Sama Dams’s high art sensibilities are wrapped around a subversive knotty core of uncompromised radicalism – like if Leonard Bernstein was signed to K Records. In that way, the DIY ethos of the Pacific Northwest has shaped much of the band’s path forward since graduating music school in 2008 and relocating to Portland in 2012.
Sama Dams’s fourth and most recent full-length album, ‘Say It’, surprises you with its gritty yet precise instrumentation, striking a keen balance between reserve and power, from wiley “Neil-Young-riding-a-rocket-sled” electric guitar riffs and mutant waves of organ to distorted ukulele and cut-up-on-the-spot breakbeats. The Portland Mercury said “‘Say It’ is an endlessly fascinating sonic concoction, and a confident step forward for Sama Dams.” What should be a series of stylistic contradictions results in each song firmly standing its ground as an interwoven compositional masterpiece, bending and twisting with eclectic abandon.
The band’s sprawling sonic footprint is held together by their dynamic vocal power – an alternate-reality vocal pairing of Kate Bush and Jeff Buckley. Sam and Lisa’s combined proficiencies and unique approaches to songwriting merge with the brilliant percussive work of drummer Micah Hummel, creating a matchless sound in live settings as well as in the studio.
Sama Dams can regularly be found gracing stages, music festivals, and living rooms across the United States and Central Europe, their music finding a place in the hearts of both music enthusiasts and general audiences alike with their intelligent arrangements, catchy melodies, and playful musicality.
The band’s support of their latest release Not Gonna Lie EP in February of 2020 was interrupted But they are happy to be back on stage, and preparing to record a full length record.