Event

SERA CAHOONE // CHRIS PUREKA

Sera Cahoone is a long way from home. Growing up the daughter of a dynamite salesman in the Colorado foothills, she got her start on the drums at 11. A year later, her skills had become so promising, her mom started taking her to dive bars to sit in with the scruffy old bluesmen. By the time she even picked up a guitar, she had been so shaped by these things the dynamite, the blues, the woods and the hills it's no surprise she went on to earn a reputation as one of the strongest songwriters in Seattle's ever-vibrant Americana scene.

She moved north in 1998 to open a snowboard/skateboard shop but quickly found herself backing lo-fi outfit Carissa's Weird on drums. Since that band split in '03, she's lent her sticks to folks as variant as Carolina rockers Band of Horses, Seattle blues chick Betsy Olson, and singer-songwriter Patrick Park. But in 2006 she struck out on her own with a self-titled debut which immediately scored praise from local and national tastemakers alike.

Six years later (four since her widely acclaimed Sub Pop debut Only as the Day Is Long), Cahoone is readying the release of her third solo effort an album which sees her ruminating on the gravitational pull of home. Titled for the Colorado canyon where she came of age, where her mother still lives, Deer Creek Canyon delves deeper and sees her voice remarkably stronger than on her previous albums.

Though some of the songs predate her move to Seattle, (she started writing "Naked" when she was 20 and finished it just before they hit "record"), it's hard to miss the running themes