Lucas Benoit is a Portland musician, open mic host, talent buyer, and songwriter. Oregon born and raised all over, Lucas finds peace in community, family, and strumming guitars.

Evolution may leave a lot on the cutting room floor, but it always preserves what is essential—not just for survival, but for the self. ​ For nearly a decade, two dueling guitarists and songwriters, Austin Smith and Mark Tegio, built the backbone of their namesake outfit, honing their hard-worn Americana songwriting. Their music shaped by years of troubadouring up and down I-5, from San Diego to Seattle. ​ Over time, their sound evolved from its more folk roots, inspired by the likes of Doc & Merle Watson and their guitar interplay, as well as mining the lines left by Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley, trying to learn the lessons those broken heroes left behind. As Smith and Tegio split their time between Portland and Santa Cruz, a new crew of musicians entered the Central California mix, expanding their sound in ways the duo perhaps didn’t know they needed—until they knew they did. ​ Enter The Lowtimers. This new 5-piece band—Tegio (guitar and vocals), Smith (guitar, vocals and harmonica), Tim Kelso (drums), Andrew Dreher (bass and harmonies), and Payton Vermeesch (pedal steel)—remain rooted in soulful Americana, but they now lay it over a new sonic landscape, injecting fresh empathy and drive into songs that paint wise western portraits of lives and loves on the road to redemption, where the goal is less about prosperity and more about peace of mind. We may remember the past, but we should never forget what the future may hold. To be open and honest with art, it’s evolve or creatively die. And often, evolution delivers an entirely new animal. ​ Their debut album Cracks is set to be released on May 16th. ​ ​

Portland artist Ac Sapphire returns with the decadent new album Dec. 32nd, songs from a cycle that honors Sapphire at her best: guitar, and vocals front and center; celebrations of the songwriter, the shredder, that she is. Sapphire sits serenely among the songwriting class that is our generation's Laurel Canyon sound. Ac's music has a grasp on the cosmic side of Americana. She resides in Portland, but was once a desert denizen, and her southwestern exposure shows in the wide open, dusty, romantic sound of each song. She's the winner of Relix Sonic Showdown, a finalist in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest. She's shared the stage with artists like Son Little, long time friend Sunny War, and even been featured on a Shirley Manson (Garbage) song. Ac has played the Philadelphia Folk Festival, Treefort Music Fest. Even as this album is being released, she's finishing recording another with NewSong Music as the winner of their 2022 contest. Sapphire makes a meta-modern version of Americana. Honoring the cross of hippies and cowboys that began the genre, embroidering thoughtful songwriting with cosmic consideration, emotional rock n roll, and western vista inspired folk rock. She’s capable of eviscerating emotions with harmonies and heated hard hitting love songs. Sapphire mines the same golden, glowing vein of Courtney Marie Andrews, Kassi Valazza, Madison Cunningham, or Mikaela Davis. She's a multi-instrumentalist and composer whose songs take the earnest torch of cosmic country and carry it forward, blazing a trail through a jaded, junk-future. Sapphire sings whole-heartedly, and makes cover-to-cover albums fit for long-play listening, sitting and smoking, soul searching, desert dazing. The results of Sapphire's serendipitous wandering can be heard on the newer tracks on Dec. 32nd. On "Chaparral Bottom", her song for long-time friend and collaborator Victoria Williams. Sapphire romanticizes the Mojave, and the peripatetic and perilous lives of working musicians, with voice and warbling electric while accompanied by a pack of coyotes yelping in the distance. You don't have to know what Sapphire is singing about for it to strike you. Her voice will penetrate your consciousness, your soul, the vibrations working from the inside out to shake tension and tumult loose. You'll weep, you'll cheer, you'll be won over. "Oblivion" sees a hail of harmonies like furies singing around an acoustic guitar. "bi" takes you for a ride: thrumming electric guitars sound like tread on hot tar, and Sapphire sings at the top of her lungs, as if to alone to her own radio. Dec. 32nd comes at a point of great upheaval for the artist. Owed to her ability to make friends and fans wherever she goes, she can book a gig anywhere in the country at a moment's notice, and has friends and fans all over the US and Europe. At the same time, her father -her first manager, and her biggest fan, has been battling cancer for the last two years. Ac also feels the pull of time as a singer/songwriter who is twenty years into a music industry at its most volatile point in history. Still, she's cranking out work, on tour, recording constantly.   Sapphire is at her mesmerizing best on songs like "Demon Sneeze", with just vocals and guitar sounding like a gorgeous chorus in a gargantuan church. A voice so strong that it seems to harmonize with its own echoes, Sapphire's songs are cathedrals unto themselves. Each effort from Ac Sapphire is saturated in sentimentality, parts of these albums are views into the soul of the person. Sapphire has an ability to imbue an album with the ghosts of her past, effectively giving them a home. This saturates her work in sentimentality, making songs like "Weed Money" and "Stringbreaker" intensely personal, and poignant heartbreakers. Each song comes with stories about Sapphire's travels.