Eugene Weekly

Sarah Donner is a New Jersey-based singer-songwriter and self-described “creative type.” Her live show includes three guitars and a ukulele. Donner tells EW she plays all four at the same time. All at the same time? Really?  “No,” Donner says. “We have dancing girls,” she jokes, before getting serious: “It’s highly upbeat and entertaining. I try to keep it lighthearted. I don’t want to be ‘that girl with a guitar.’ So I always try and make it funny and quirky.”  Continue reading →

Michigan band Frontier Ruckus is driving through the badlands of Wyoming.  “I’m in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming,” says Matt Milia, Frontier Ruckus vocalist and primary songwriter. “The cell service is a little spotty.”  This sense of expansive loneliness permeates the bittersweet power-pop of the band’s 2014 release, Sitcom Afterlife.  “It was a break-up record,” Milia says. “It was an interesting juxtaposition of dark subject matter and power-pop.”  Continue reading →

In 1994, I was one year old, sitting in the grass wearing a blue floral dress and eating a Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Peace Pop. This made sense: Like many children of Deadheads, my parents had brought me to the Grateful Dead show at Autzen Stadium on June 17, 1994.  My parents met in the summer of ’88 on their way to a Dead show at Autzen. My mom had never been to Oregon and needed a ride from Los Angeles; my dad gave her one.  Five years later, I was born and they were taking me to Grateful Dead concerts.   Continue reading →