Essie and The Hum Came Prepared

4. Essie and the Hum

Sounds like: drinking tea on the porch on a rainy morning.

There’s no such thing as overnight success.

As you read through the profiles in this issue, you’ll notice that some of Portland’s Best New Bands aren’t new at all. In fact, some first formed as long ago as 2016.

That’s not the case for Essie and The Hum, a Portland quartet that started playing together in May 2025. Since then, they’ve played numerous live shows; they recorded their first EP, Live at Clay St. Studios, last December. They’ll also play at Kelly’s Olympian this Friday—and the EasyFolk Festival in September—as part of Mitch Whitaker’s EasyFolk series.

But really, the band’s rapid ascent in the Portland music scene is the result of years of work and preparation.

Singer-guitarist Essie Humbertson and guitarist Paul Danowski went to Jesuit High School in Portland together. Humberston tells WW she always wanted to write songs, but struggled to find the confidence. “I tried to write songs, I think starting in high school, and it was just like, I could never get over my own self-doubt around it. I just really despised everything that I wrote.”

She and Danowski both attended college in Chicago—Humbertson at Loyola, Danowski at DePaul. They kept in touch, and both moved back to Portland after graduation.

In 2023, Humberston says, she went through a “really big breakup” and started writing songs more seriously.

“A lot of them stuck, and we play a lot of them now,” she says. She started playing open-mic nights and posting songs on TikTok.

“I was watching TikToks that you were posting while you were songwriting, just putting them out,” Danowksi tells Humbertson. “And I was like, oh my God, these are gorgeous songs. I’m serious. And when I moved back to Portland, I don’t know how—I think I must have just texted you. I was like, hey, if you ever need a guitarist, let me know.”

Eventually, the two began playing together, along with bassist Jaxx Ward and drummer Steven Douglas, whom Humberston met through an informal a cappella group called, as it happens, Hum Cafe.

They started playing shows together in June—that is, weeks after they formed. Those first shows, Danowski says, felt “transformational” as the band began to refine its sound. But that doesn’t mean they were always easy. A show at The Heights last June—their third ever—found each band member battling serious nerves before taking the stage.

“The act that played before us was just like, really, really good,” Douglas says. “And I feel like I witnessed that. And it just poked at all my insecurities as a musician. And I was like, I suck.”

Ward echoes that: “There were things that made us insecure individually, and we were kind of all there for each other in that way—to feel the support of one another in that moment, to make us not feel like we had done something wrong.” But they got through it, he adds. “It was just that, you know, we were where we were as a band, and there was only forward to go, and here we are.”

Humberston says she still struggles with impostor syndrome—but her bandmates see each other through it.

“I think we all have a big heart—that we do really, just the four of us as friends, care about each other a lot,” Humbertson says. “I think that we have a lot of belief in what we’re doing together and in the songs that we’re playing. And that’s been my, like, coping mechanism for every time I’m like, I’m bad at music, which I think The Heights was the first time that happened. It’s happened many times since.”

As the band spoke with WW—seated around a table in front of Chapman Elementary School on one of the first days of the year that truly felt like spring—their easy, earnest rapport was in plain view.

“I just feel so secure in what we’re doing because I know whenever we are onstage, we can just have fun, and it’s so much fun to relax into that feeling and really trust you guys,” Douglas says.

“Deep trust,” Humbertson murmurs.

That trust might account in part for the band’s mature sound; Live at Clay St. Studios doesn’t sound like the product of just a few months of practice.

And while Humberston may have only recently worked up the nerve to start writing songs, her songwriting has a studied, reflective quality, as if she’s finally arrived at the right words to describe things that have nagged at her for years. (“I don’t like loud talkers,” Humberston sings on “Tall Enough. “They make the room feel smaller/But I keep my mouth shut/It’s rude to interrupt/When will I stand up/Without shaking?”)

And while the word “folk” is the one that comes most readily to mind for their sound—with Humberston’s voice reminiscent of Gillian Welch and her thoughtful, sometimes self-lacerating lyrics evoking Joni Mitchell—Danowski’s guitar work brings, where appropriate, a bigger, splashier, reverb-laden sound. They all listen to different music, they say, and are constantly trading links to songs and albums in the band’s group chat. Their influences range from Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd to Angel Olsen and Big Thief to Caroline Polachek.

They hope to tour at some point, but for now, they say, it’s just nice that nice things keep happening for them.

“I hesitate to say the word luck, but I feel like there’s been luck in ways,” Humberston says. “I think ‘serendipitous’ is the right word because when those things have come our way, we’ve also been able to meet them.”

Says Ward, “You have to get the bigger stuff in the right position to get lucky in order to get lucky.”