Rooted in folk-rock and woodsy Americana, the Moondoggies take influences from such vocally inclined groups as the Byrds, the Band, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Although hailing from Seattle, seeds for the band's formation were planted in nearby Everett, Washington, where they formed a teenaged band while attending Cascade High School. The students discovered their talent for three-part vocal harmonies, and when Murphy returned from a summer-long stay in Alaska in 2005, the four friends reconvened in Seattle to form the Moondoggies. Taking up residence at a local dive bar named the Blue Moon Tavern, the Moondoggies honed their craft and soon netted a contract with Hardly Art, an imprint of Seattle's own Sub Pop Records. Don't Be a Stranger, the band's woozy debut, appeared in 2008, with the mature Tidelands following in October 2010. Third album Adios I'm a Ghost, released in 2013 and aided by the addition of multi-instrumentalist Jon Pontrello to the band, fell somewhere between the two in sound and tone.

Brenna Bruce is a singer-songwriter based in Seattle. Following a path of curiosity and introspection, her music moves with a quiet power, balancing sharpness and tenderness with an understood patience. Bruce pulls from the tradition of vulnerable folk through delicate and crystalline vocal prowess akin to Courtney Marie Andrews and Emmylou Harris, with the simplicity and focus of Gillian Welch’s storytelling. On her forthcoming debut EP Honest Bloom, Bruce weaves ambling stories of the heart with peripheral landscapes passing through the deserts, rivers, and mountains of her past in the southwest, and present in the Pacific Northwest. Honest Bloom inhabits spaces of liminality and cyclical growth, spinning themes of connection, belonging, and becoming, with lilting pedal steel and string arrangements, tethered by pulsing percussion and the intentional delivery of Brenna’s vocal harmonies carrying each sentiment to fruition. Honest Bloom is a capsule of time, reckoning with the ever-unfolding path of being and learning life’s lessons, and Brenna Bruce is an artist burgeoning with timeless truths.