Songwriters Round the Mountain featuring Laura Gibson

Friday, December 5th, 2025

$17 Advance // $20 Day Of Show
6pm Doors / 7pm Show
All Ages

SONGWRITERS ROUND THE MOUNTAIN is a listening room series highlighting song craft by featuring some of the best regional and national songwriters working today. These evenings consist of a headlining songwriter with an opening songwriter round for support.

FEATURING LAURA GIBSON
Laura Gibson is a writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist born and raised in the small Oregon logging town of Coquille. With a love of traditional folk music and a bent toward experimentation, she has performed on four continents and had the distinct honor of playing the very first (and 200th) NPR Tiny Desk Concert.

Her most recent album Goners (Barsuk/City Slang) was praised by NPR as “a gripping collection of songs about accountability and grief.” The Fader called it, “so incessantly beautiful that one cannot help but want to gently crack it open to get to its beating core.” The New York Times described her themes as “longing and instinct, and whether they can ever converge.” She’s an enthusiastic collaborator, writing music for theater and film and lending her voice to many beloved bands. Her essays have appeared in Talkhouse, the Los Angeles Review and Oregon Humanities Magazine, and she was a 2020 recipient of the McElheny Award from MIT for her work on the Timber Wars podcast. She is currently working on both a book and a new album.

OPENING ROUND FROM:

KELE GOODWIN
Kele Goodwin has spent his life in three places: in Juneau, Alaska; on the Navajo Nation; and in the misty Pacific Northwest. He makes music that sings from bone marrow, from a life and landscape alternately charted and lost, crushed and rebuilt. It is music made familiar by the experience of pain and its lessons. It is music to live by.

Goodwin’s debut album Hymns was produced by Sean Ogilvie of Musé Méchanique and features guest performances from Laura Gibson, Alela Diane, Ogilvie himself, Douglas Jenkins of The Portland Cello Project, and many others. His lyrics are both observation and prayer, delicate lines built on an architecture of gratitude and disbelief of the world around him.

ISABEAU WAIA’U WALKER
Bright gloom, a single duality of the many that define Isabeau Waia’u Walker. Songs that are soothing and soft while powerful, accessible while complex, sweet but aching. The tension of the contradiction that she holds nest in her core and reverberates through the layers of her product: storytelling, collaboration, presentation, music. Culture, race, and language surface in her work; half a life in her native Hawaii, the second in Oregon. For over a decade of being a high school teacher, she made music, slowly amassing an impressive YouTube subscribership. She orchestrated an early retirement from education to redirect attention to music, allowing her to tour as a member of Y La Bamba and to record her EP, Better Metric. “Woman,” a track off the EP, making OPB music’s Oregon’s top songs of 2020. She independently released her full length album, Body, in 2022. Soon after, she built out her band and headed back to The Center for Sound, Light and Color to record HEAVYWEIGHT, the most recent body of songs based in heartache and resilience.

BEN JOHNSON
Ben Johnson tours the rural northwest blending folk, jazz, and country western into a unique solo sound. His stories range from complex tales of city life to abstract ballads of rural hardship and triumph.