Portland – Sera Cahoone sits on the cover of her most recent album, Deer Creek Canyon, alone on a stump, surrounded by columns of textured green and brown forest. It’s a beautifully serene scene. You can almost hear the quiet. I’m not sure what Cahoone’s writing process is, but after seeing her solo performance at the Doug Fir, this is how I like to picture it; she’s alone, with only a guitar and a bucolic landscape expanding around her.

Cahoone’s time was brief, as she was opening for Patterson Hood, but it only took her 30-minute set to remember the raw energy that accompanies performers armed with only a guitar and a set list. It’s easy to marginalize musicians without a backing band or a stage full of instruments as a singer/songwriter in the most banal sense. The coffeehouse troubadour, who belts out war-torn love ballads isn’t something I like to recall, but this was a far cry from anything resembling that.  Having played music for most of her life, Cahoone showed she didn’t need a band to hold a nearly sold-out room last Wednesday night.

Walking onstage to hoots and hollers, Cahoone said a few “hellos” before quieting the audience with soft notes on her acoustic guitar. Her second song, “Lay You Down,” began with slow picked chords that seemed to impossibly mourn and celebrate life’s complexities. “Oh so how you gonna grow if you don’t know you’re dragging you down,” she sang. “You’ll waste the rest of your days if you worry all your life.”

It’s this duality in Cahoone’s music that’s truly engaging. Ostensibly, it’s an accessible folk/pop construct, but contrasted with the way she spins cool, melancholic lyrics and vocal progressions over the music, there’s no mistaking her for anyone on CMT. Once she moved through “Naked”, the ground-stomping “Nervous Wreck” and titular album highlight “Deer Creek Canyon”, any side conversations that had been percolating in the background were gone. At one point, a man leaned himself up against a support pillar, eyes closed, taking deep affected sighs.

After playing one of her latest, unreleased tracks (hopefully off a soon to be released album), Cahoone thanked the crowd and walked off stage. There was no encore, but some folks stuck around hoping she might reappear with her guitar.

On Deer Creek Canyon, released in 2012, Cahoone is certainly not alone.  With contributions from banjo, bass, organ, violin, cello, pedal steel players and others, the sound is—as you might expect—much larger than what she plays solo. Still, now that I’ve heard both sides of Cahoone’s catalogue, I might prefer solo show. So if it turns out she did write songs alone in the forest, it’d be nice to think you’d be that much closer to the origins of Cahoone’s musical wellspring.

Be sure to see Sera Cahoone when she tours near you—

FRI, Feb 7 
Shakedown Bellingham, WA

SAT, Feb 8 
Tractor Tavern Seattle, WA

FRI, Feb 21 
Queen Elizabeth Theatre Toronto, ON

SAT, Feb 22 
State Theater (NY) Ithaca, NY

SUN, Feb 23 
The Egg Albany, NY

TUE, Feb 25 
Somerville Theatre, Somerville, MA

THU, Feb 27 
Lincoln Theatre Raleigh, NC

FRI, Feb 28 
Town Hall Theater New York, NY

SAT, Mar 1 
Merriam Theater Philadelphia, PA

MON, Mar 3 
Trustees Theater Savannah, GA

WED, Mar 5 
Ryman Auditorium Nashville, TN

SAT, May 31 
Southend Grooveyard Salt Spring Island, Canada