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!
Jenn Rawling composes highly melodic songs from fascinating scraps of images and phrases, singing them with a vibrant, immediately engaging yodel-edged alto. Rawling’s poetic lyrics are enhanced by her sophisticated sense of phrasing and pace. Her work binds people back to the web of life, reconnects us to the land, and celebrates the continuance of human, animal, plant, and elemental relationships. She is celebrating the release of her new record ‘Golden Colors’.
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Grasshopper. Seasoned Roadhouse Americana with a dose of dance-inducing psychedelic hop
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Lana and Kevin’s original songs quietly honor the simple beauty of early American folk, blues, and country. Guitars, sweet harmonies, and the occasional harmonica, fiddle, or singing saw blend together to result in a perfect tranquil soundtrack for a long road trip, or a late- night porch gathering on a quiet summer night.
Dramady, formed in 2006, is a low-key indie-pop duo from Portland, OR. They make blissed out mellow tunes that will replay in your head for days. A multi-instrumentalist band that hits all the frequencies they possibly can with 4 hands. Their music ranges from lazy Sunday morning love songs to synthed-out catchy dance ditties.
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Chicago-born jazz/punk/barrelhouse musician Stephanie Nilles has been doin’ Kesey proud one bar at a time since 2008, hustling around the United States, Europe, and Canada (except from 2009-2010 for legal reasons), averaging 150 gigs a year, and captivating unsuspecting listeners with a voice that would make Jelly Roll Morton look orthodox and Ma Rainey look sober.
Having studied piano and cello since the age of six, she was a finalist at the Young Concert Artists’ International Competition, a gold medalist at the Fischoff Competition, and had performed on NPR on three occasions by the age of seventeen. At twenty-two, she had graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music with a degree in classical piano performance and temporarily relocated to New York City, where she began writing songs and performed regularly on the east village anti-folk scene while making a living working odd jobs as a dog walker, valet parking attendant, Italian coffee bar barista, ghostwriter, and research assistant to a blind bioethicist at an all boys’ Jewish university.
She has since sung with Bobby McFerrin in Carnegie Hall, directed the musical program of a Brooklyn burlesque series, covered Busta Rhymes’ “Break Ya Neck” in the skeletal remains of a bombed-out cathedral in Nuremberg, been invited to perform official showcases at SXSW and International Folk Alliance, and self-released 5 full-length albums, three of which were picked up for European release by German roots/blues label Tradition und Moderne (Taj Mahal, John Fahey).
When Stephanie’s not sleeping in her car, she lives in New Orleans, which might not be the best idea.
Joseph Hein hails from the Palouse in eastern Washington State. With lush arrangements and warm distortion, he creates dreamy harmonious sounds with an energetic uptempo rhythm influenced by songs of yesteryear’s AM country and R&B gold. He is often accompanied by an array of instruments including a trombone, a violin, keyboards and guitars that add to the band’s distinct style. Joseph Hein sings honestly about good times and the bad and the music bears witness to the road unkempt and a winding trail.
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Portland songwriter, Matthew Zeltzer (of The American West), emerged from a year of exile- living on an organic farm in Half Moon Bay, Ca raising chickens, writing songs about the apocalypse as a relationship slowly fell apart. He then puttered around Half Moon Bay, finishing the songs, before returning to Portland and forming his new project, The American West. It is these songs that fill his new release, “The Soot Will Bring Us Back Again,” which Frank Gutch Jr. (No Depression), calls, “Words to the wise. A warning. Beautifully done.” The Soot Will Bring Us Back Again is flecked with pedal steel and longing harmonies as the album drifts between finger-picked folk songs and raucous country-rockers, all while the focus remains on Zeltzer’s ragged poetry.
“Sweetheart of The Rodeo” – Willamette Week
Lindsie Feathers is a rabble rousing honky-tonk woman that’s spreading her wings and trusting in the flight. Her latest album, Neon Renaissance, was engineered and mixed by Adam Selzer at Type Foundry (Sallie Ford, Laura Gibson, Scout Niblet). Her songs are about love, the life journey, our planet and it’s dwindling resources, connecting to our ancestors, and honoring our heroes.
In the words of the Neon Renaissance creed, written to define the album: “Let us follow our dream, teach the earth, serve humanity. We seek to love; not hate. To heal; not hurt. Let love prevail.”
Three For Silver is post-collapse, post-apocalyptic, post-rock, post-everything. A freewheeling collective in which the only rule is to survive and perform, an elastic conglomeration of musical freaks as likely to be found in a grand theater performing for foreign dignitaries as busking on your street corner for spare change.
Lucas Warford (vocals, basses) is the thumping heart of the band, a chugging diesel engine of bass and growl. “The acid baby of Tom Waits and Les Claypool,” as NW legend Baby Gramps once called him. His one-of-a-kind basses are the platform upon which he yowls and raps his end-time visions of the world. Willo Sertain (vocals, accordion) hails from the woods of North Carolina, her distinctively pure tones and haunting melodies act as a natural foil to the madness of Warford. Greg Allison (strings, mandolin, arrangement) is the master of pure sound, beating the ungainly ideas of Warford and Sertain into something resembling songs. He writes string quartet arrangements like he’s writing his own name, and generally classes up the joint.
Three For Silver has hit the road since 2013, unleashing their idiosyncratic sound on over 200 audiences a year, blind to anything but the next stage, the next audience, the next night. With nary a manager or booker in sight, their monomaniacal devotion has already led them all over the country and the world, performing in clubs, bars, theaters, boats, festivals, farmer’s markets, living rooms, and most recently partnering with the US State Department for ongoing cultural exchange tours to other countries thirsty for truly original American music.
Whether live or on their new record, Three For Silver is a band for this moment, when it is hard to imagine the future and all too easy to focus on the past, when the rules no longer seem to apply, and when what you never thought possible is the only choice you’ve got.
Matty Charles songs are often called “instant classics”. They take the stark simplicity of Johnny Cash, mix in Townes Van Zandt’s poetic sensibility and hold you to your seat with vocal harmonies worthy of the Louvin Brothers.
The Matty Charles & Katie Rose sound is deeply rooted in American country and folk traditions, evidenced by their close singing and Matty’s “church-lick-boom-chuck” guitar playing. Their songs speak of love and loss in such a timeless way that it’s hard not to relate if you have ever experienced either.
Their debut album, Catching Arrows combines the duo with an all-star band of americana/roots music luminaries and has been called, “a sublime listening experience.” and “a must have album.” (bealestreet.be) as well as, “the kind of album that can break out and surprise even the most jaded music critics.”
The admiration of fellow musicians and fans caused this duo to tour Europe in 2016 where they played to full houses and received glowing reviews for their performances.
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Catch them live and hear how, “Charles and Rose prove that they may be among the best duos in the genre.” (Lambert Smits, keysandchords.com)
They also sing about Time Machines, birds and helicopters.
Formed in Portland, Oregon in 2007 and based on the songs of Dustin Hamman, Run On Sentence involves a rotating cast of musicians but most frequently is the core duo of Dustin (Guitar/Vocals) and Drummer Dan Galucki. Though the lineup shifts frequently, Dustin is always front and center, sharing his unique blend of intimate lyrics and dynamic musical amalgamations, often consisting of elements of Soul, Folk, Psych, Rock and Country. Over the years, Run On Sentence has shared members and stages with amazing Portland bands like Loch Lomond, The Builders and The Butchers, Laura Gibson and Wooden Indian Burial Ground. They’ve also been blessed to share the stage with some of their favorite national artists like, Rodriguez and Vic Chesnutt. The duo version of Run On Sentence will be performing at the Sou’wester on Sunday, August 27th.
This event is free and open to the public.