Music

Tim Coffey has been writing music for the past two years and now is preparing to release his first full-length record. This story sounds similar to that of other local musicians, but here's where Coffey's background strays – he's 55 years old.
Also, it's worth noting that he's not new to the world of music, it's just the songwriting angle that's somewhat recently become a part of his life. Coffey, you see, spent 20 years as a professional musician, touring the country with an array of bands, playing an array of styles. Most were cover bands, some were lounge bands, and some – he admits – weren't all that good.
“It was all cover stuff. There were a few originals, but it was pretty standard bar music for the most part,” says Coffey.
By the time he was 36, Coffey had for the most part placed his musical aspirations on the backburner. He ended up moving to Holland for two years, but never really caught on with the live music scene there and returned to Oregon where he became the general manager of a pair of spas. About eight years ago, he relocated to Bend, a place that had been on his mind since he was 19 years old when he came to town with a touring band called Nancy Day and Nancy Night.
“They were bad people, but I learned a lot over those six months,” says Coffey of the experience.”

Dolorean
The Unfazed
Partisan Record

If Dolorean has been lumped with other country folk-rock acts, that move was based on assumptions. Al James' (Dolorean's primary songwriter) lyrics and song-smithing have always elevated this group above the standard break up musings.

“I get bored so easy. That's really my blessing and my curse,” says Tom Shimura, the man better known as Lyrics Born, the stage name he's been using for about two decades now.
It's his insatiable boredom, Shimura says, that has led him to reinvent himself as a musician not just between albums but on a song-to-song basis. While most know him as one of the leading rappers in the Bay Area hip-hop scene, when he comes to WinterFest on Saturday night, the set he and his band kick out will be far from straight-ahead rap music. That's because on his latest record, As U Were, Lyrics Born has shifted gears – once again – this time molding his sound into an electro-rock funk machine.

While some kids are punching out the lenses of their mom's ridiculous '80s glasses to add irony to their wardrobe, Tacoma's Owen Hart picks and chooses the best of metal from ages ago on its debut album, Earth Control – and not for irony's sake.
The band isn't reinventing the wheel here, but that's not what matters. It's more important to note that Owen Hart somehow sandwiches speed metal, thrash, hardcore and death metal together – a combo that would be easy to screw up – on Earth Control.

When most girls her age were, well, doing whatever it is 11-year-old kids did in the mid 1990s, Joanna Lee was already writing songs. And now, 14 years later, she's recorded one of those tracks, filmed a video for it and the tune has become a calling card of sorts for her unique blend of indie folk and soul music.
That song, “Sunshine,” was one that she penned with her mother, and she wrote it with one intention in mind – to impress a boy, of course.
“I wrote it about a little boy. I was in sixth grade and I had a crush on this eighth grader. I thought if I played the song, I thought he'd fall for me,” says Lee, a graduate of Bend High School who has been playing music since cutting her teeth at church performances with her two musically inclined parents.

The sonic backgrounds on “Walking Far From Home,” the first track on Iron and Wine's new album Kiss Each Other Clean, craftily connects Iron and Wine's impressive effort on The Shepherd's Dog while, as the song title suggests, being away in a new time and place. We could infer, by studying the cover's illustration of a home in flames, that singer Sam Beam – calm, motionless and knee deep in water – is responsible for the fire and smoke.