Laura Veirs, “Seaside Haiku”

On a solo trip to the Oregon coast a few years ago, Portlander Laura Veirs spent hours wandering the beach at Hug Point with Gram, her chihuahua mix. Back at her hotel in Seaside, she wrote haikus. When she shared them on Patreon and a supporter suggested she turn them into a song, she initially bristled.

But the idea proved a good one. While the resulting track may not keep the 17-syllable structure of the haiku, its striking nature imagery—“black and gold sand,” “vermillion sun”—evokes the form. The message here is of liberation. The song’s video finds Veirs, in black sunglasses and waterproof yellow cap, buried to her neck in sand; 55 seconds in, she’s freed herself and is flying a kite.

As is Veirs’s wont, both overdriven electric guitar and soft fingerpicking on nylon string have their place here, as do warped acoustic notes on the choruses. “I wanted to write music that felt like the ocean,” she says. “The ocean isn’t hard, but it’s cold and bright and tough.”

Black Belt Eagle Scout, “Sčičudᶻ (a narrow place)”

Early in the pandemic, Katherine “KP” Paul moved home. After more than a decade in Portland, making a name as Black Belt Eagle Scout, Paul returned to the Swinomish Reservation on Puget Sound, where as a child she’d sat on her dad’s lap as he led drum circles at powwows.

Powwows weren’t in the cards for 2020. Instead, Paul took to nature. A cedar-filled peninsula with views of the Salish Sea called her back over and over, eventually inspiring the song “Sčičudᶻ” (pronounced “cheats-oats”), which in Lushootseed means “a narrow place.” Here, Paul says, she felt witnessed by her ancestors. “I see the way you look at me dancing,” she sings.

Over a sinuous guitar line, Paul’s reverb-soaked vocals have a woozy feel. “One of the things I tried to weave into the production was this etherealness, which I get when I think about cedar,” she says. “If you imagine cedar being blown by the wind, [it’s] representative of those reverb sounds.”

Laura Gibson, “La Grande”

The title track off Laura Gibson’s 2012 album is something of a ghost story. You can hear it in the lyrics—“ghost wind,” “bone-white clay,” “orphan tune”—and in the spectral moans and menacing strings. The spark arrived when the Portlander was researching historic train accidents and came across a wreck that occurred outside the Eastern Oregon town of La Grande, in front of the Hot Lake Hotel. Though now part of the renovated Lodge at Hot Lake Springs, the original structure dates to 1864 and has lived many lives: hospital, luxury resort, sanitarium, World War II flight school, nursing home, even a short-lived nightclub. Eventually abandoned, the crumbling property became—no surprise—a magnet for ghost hunters.

For Gibson, it was less about the specific hauntings than about honoring how history asserts itself in the present (though at least one of the rumors, of a piano playing itself, appears in the song’s eerie, elegant video, which was shot at the hotel). “The ghost story is a way of engaging with the fact that the past is both gone and there, still,” she says. Midway through the track, the clattering percussion quiets and Gibson’s vocals take focus. “That breakdown in the middle, that’s these many layers of my voice doing weird oohs,” she says. “That was the ghost choir.”