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!
Green Hills Alone is the songwriting moniker for Chris Miller. In 2014, Miller recorded a collection of songs with fellow bandmate Mark Robertson and the talents of Sleepy Volcano: a creative collective/record label. Robertson, who fronts the band Harlowe, and Miller perform live together in support of both their respective albums. Supporting the evening is Portland guitarist and songwriter, Scott Hampton. Hampton is a longtime collaborator of Mike Coykendall and the brilliant mind behind Hamptone recording gear.
The Sou’wester welcomes the band Little Wings on their Little Wings Explains Northwest Tour 2015. This band, formed in the late 1990’s in San Luis Obispo, California, released their first album in 1998 and EXPLAINS in 2015 on Woodsist Records.
Three years ago, Vikesh Kapoor performed at Howard Zinn’s memorial service in Boston, in front of Zinn’s family and colleagues (including Noam Chomsky). Inspired by Zinn’s lifelong battle against class/race injustice, Kapoor spent the next two years in Portland working on a concept record based on a related newspaper article. His debut album, The Ballad Of Willy Robbins, chronicles the brutal but hopeful story of a working class man who slowly loses everything: ambitions, health, family and shelter.
Best 100 Albums of the Year – ROUGH TRADE
“Kapoor’s cameos of blue-collar life are poignant and universal: wrecked home towns, insecure employment, busted dreams. An impressive debut.” ★★★★ THE GUARDIAN
“A series of sharply etched portraits of struggling Americans that points back along a road of socially conscious songs.” – THE NEW YORKER
“Sincere, husky ballads of the apathetic, recession-era (or Depression-era) working man.” – INTERVIEW MAGAZINE
“One of our favorite folk albums from 2013” – THE FRETBOARD JOURNAL
“Folk’s Newest Hero” – THE BLUEGRASS SITUATION
A wonderful treat to have Josephine Foster coming to the Sou’wester with special guest Michael Hurley!
“There are few of Foster’s contemporaries who are able to voice a song in such a striking and idiosyncratic manner, and it is borne out in the spate of enthralling albums that she has released in recent years. Her last record, Blood Rushing, offered a selection of recordings that showed Foster’s interest in both European and American folk traditions, indicative of her roots in Colorado and her time living in Spain.”
“Foster’s work touches on tradition in a way that seems both retrospective and reverent, without necessarily giving itself over to pure emulation. ‘Pretty Please’ is tinged with a country feel, its taut double bass and strumming guitar offset by a tinkling set of honkey-tonk ivories and the late inclusion of Victor Herrero’s slide guitar. Immediately following is ‘Magenta’, with Foster’s voice beautifully complemented by a cluster of piano chords and bowed bass, the results almost too tender for a listener caught off-guard. It is a precise example of the level of fine detail in the composition and execution of I’m A Dreamer; a demonstration of the gathering together of a musical knowledge and confidence in attempting things that would seem pat or dull in the hands of less confident musicians.” The Quietus Review by Andrew Spragg
“Michael Hurley is an American folk singer who was essential to the Greenwich folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He is able to play a wide variety of instruments. Michael Hurley is also a cartoonist and a painter.” Wikipedia
Veteran songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Coykendall has been amazingly prolific over the last three decades. Currently most well known for his duties as a sideman, producer, and recordist via his work with M Ward, Blitzen Trapper, She & Him, Annalisa Tornfelt, & Tin Hat Trio, to name a few, Coykendall has been making his own unique outsider records since the mid ’80s.
photo credit: Michael Bordelon
Celebrate Halloween at the Sou’wester BYOP style! Bring your own pumpkin and your favorite carving tools and we will all gather at the Sou’wester for a Pumpkin Carving Party! Don’t forget to bring a candle to light your creation at the end for our jack-o-lantern show!
Love Gigantic and band members Sarah King, Chet Lyster, Ryan Moore, David Langenes, Arthur Parker, and Lara Michel bring a bit of rock and roll to the Sou’wester! Let’s get spooky on this Halloween night with a dance party and Love Gigantic!
“Collectively, the six members of Love Gigantic have an impressive resume that covers considerable musical ground in the Portland scene and beyond.” Love Gigantic, their debut full-length album was released in August 2014. “Full of rich harmonies, some wicked guitar solos and perfectly placed percussion, the whole thing feels like the complete package with more than a few earworms you’ll likely find yourself softly humming after you’ve shut off the stereo. It’s obvious that music is a lifestyle for Love Gigantic and something they do for the love of it. ‘What role doesn’t it play?’ they question. ‘Music makes everything else bearable. And it gives us a chance to wear fake leather pants.’” -Vortex Music Magazine
Join us in welcoming the band Ages and Ages to the Sou’wester! “Anthemic choruses, irresistible pop harmonies, and the kind of exuberant vibes that everyone can use” -NYLON
“Ages and Ages’ debut LP, Alright You Restless, was an ambitious, conceptual piece of sing-along, clap-along, stomp-along pop rock that vaulted the band into elite company. That first record pontificated upon the throes of isolation as a form of revolution, elated choral melodies anchoring shimmery guitars and tight rhythmic interludes throughout. The Portland conglomerate’s second album, Divisionary, is a lot of that, too; there are plenty of goosebump-raising hooks and uplifting crescendos to write home about. Their thematic scope, however, involved the excavation of darker inspirations than they’d previously explored as a band. Ages and Ages have undergone lineup changes and lots of peripheral personal battles and have somehow managed to internalize and later deduce how to navigate the avenues of their own lives in triumphant—and insanely memorable—song. In the process, they’ve come out with one of this year’s best all-around albums.”—Ryan J. Prado (Paste Magazine)
JENNY DON’T AND THE SPURS have been making their own brand of roots country music since early 2012. The core members of the group, Jenny Don’t (DON’T), Sam Henry (WIPERS, NAPALM BEACH, DON’T), and Kelly Halliburton (PIERCED ARROWS, P.R.O.B.L.E.M.S.) all bring something from their own extensive and long musical backgrounds to the table to create the rich musical tableau that comprises JENNY DON’T AND THE SPURS.
Following in the wake of their two vinyl singles, their debut self-titled album continues in the tradition of the band’s signature sound, evoking the spirit of lonely desert roads, longing hearts, and star-filled skies over sweeping Western landscapes. While the sound of the Spurs is original and draws from deep wells of personal experience, the band pays stylistic homage to the greats of the genre – Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams Sr., Loretta Lynne, and all the rest of the real players from the 1940’s and 50’s…an era where the lines between Rock n’ Roll and Country were blurred, where the likes of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins could tour together and nobody would bat an eye.
On this record the trio is joined by a star-studded cast comprised of some of Portland’s finest musicians: Lewi Longmire (The West Coast Roasters, Michael Hurley Band, Fernando, etc…), David Lipkind (I Can Lick Any SOB in the House, Spigot, Rich Del Grosso, etc.), Jerry A (Poison Idea), Dan Lowinger (Don’t, Barn Door Slammers), and JT Halmfilst (Thee Headliners, Audios Amigos).