On His Eyrst Debut, Rapper ePP Gets Personal and Looks Inward

“I know it’s been talked about before, but I wanted to add my take on the other issues we face,” says ePP, who declined to share his real name and his age. “There are times when we feel alone and know that no matter how hard people try, there are things about being black in America that they’ll never fully comprehend. I want to keep that conversation going.” “They,” of course, refers to those in white society holding hierarchical power over blacks and other people of color. On his new record, There’s a Place for People Like You, which was released last week on local hip-hip label Eyrst, ePP addresses those social mechanisms.

Portland Hip-Hop Producer Sir Nai Unleashes His Inner Id on “The 58 Tape”

As a young Portland native, his id has a lot to say. “58 is a representation of feelings I can’t show; he’s a representation of the anger I feel like I cannot express without being in danger,” says Slaughter. “Things I feel like I can’t express in my daily life, that may not be socially acceptable to express because people fear that kind of anger. Being an angry black person in Portland makes me feel like I’m on the radar. That anger wells up inside of me and I had to voice it somehow.”

Christopher Neil Young Wants to Challenge the Tortured-Artist Trope by Sharing His Own Story

In 2013, Young moved from Oregon to Nashville. Like countless songwriters before him, Young was lured by Music City’s glitz and Grand Ole Opry grandeur. But Young soon found himself getting lost, adrift in a sea of dream seekers. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities, Young became entrenched in Music Row’s dark side. A storm of untreated mental illness and severe alcoholism soon robbed Young of his will to play and to live.

Damien Jurado’s First All-Acoustic Album Pays Tribute to the Late Richard Swift

Layperson’s Last EP Was a Race Against His Changing Voice, But His Debut Album is Fully Formed

Morris’s earnest folk-pop lyricism has been compared to that of Cat Stevens. Early glimpses of Morris’ vocally driven, “folkish” record have also sparked comparisons to the powerful vocal androgyny of Tracy Chapman and the rainy-day musings of Elliott Smith. In the album’s two-year incubation period, though, Morris settled into his own voice. “I feel like it’s at a place now where it represents me as well as my other voice did, which is really what I want,” he says. “I want it to be an expression of me.”

Jazz Has a High Point of Entry, Both Culturally and Financially. A New Showcase Wants to Change That.

options are still limited for this city’s younger generation of jazz musicians, and for jazz-curious audiences who can’t shell out a lot of money for a ticket. So Rossi, a vet of both Portland’s jazz and rock scenes, began mulling a plan. One night, after hoisting a few pints, he decided to just go for it. “Honestly, at like 1 am I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll reach out to my favorite musicians and see what happens,’ and I started emailing around,” he says. “Amazingly, I started getting responses the next day. That actually ended up with us landing Justin Brown, who is Thundercat’s drummer, in February at the Liquor Store.”

A New Drag Series Doubles as a History Lesson About Femmes in Music

“I define femme very loosely as a femme-identifying person, whether that’s a cis or trans female, whether that’s a queer man or a gay man, also trans men,” she says. “Femmes seems somewhat exclusionary of trans men, but I have made it clear I essentially don’t want to showcase cis straight white men.”

On Her Remixed EP, Kingsley Ups Her Music’s Danceability and Defies Easy Categorization

Her debut EP, I Am Because I Am, was inspired by a local producer telling her to stick to neo-soul and R&B because of how black and Aretha Franklin-like her voice sounded to him. “I created this EP with five different genres in one, just to prove a point that musicians don’t have to stick to one genre, and the color of your skin shouldn’t determine which one,” she says.