Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP.
This month, Shaina Shepherd came to KEXP, where she and Martin Douglas had a sprawling conversation that lasted well over an hour—where they talked about growing up in the church, sneaking around to listen to alternative rock music, and her long journey from Tacoma to Brooklyn and back around to the Northwest, where she became, in Martin’s words, “(not very) arguably Seattle’s greatest vocalist.”
“I think that the city has a relationship with Black femme energy in these male-dominated music spaces. Male stories. And then an infusion of Black, feminine energy that is a very integral part of our story as a town.”
In a recording booth at KEXP, I am about 40 minutes deep into a sprawling, discursive conversation with Shaina Shepherd that has gone down the path of rhapsodizing Bam Bam’s Tina Bell for paving the way for Seattle’s contemporary rock scene. If Shepherd is “arguably” the greatest vocalist in the city today, then it must be a very short argument people are having. She’s a fixture in the aforementioned rock scene—from her first band Bearaxe to her much-ballyhooed SMooCH performance with the surviving members of Soundgarden, where she stepped in the immense shoes of Chris Cornell for one night.
Shepherd belongs to a lineage that began with Bam Bam and has continued to this day, where the Tacoma-born musician shares that lineage with contemporaries like Maya Marie and Nicolle Swims of Black Ends. “But you know,” Shepherd says, “all of this started with Tina Bell.”
Shepherd’s musical journey began in a Tacoma church. Much like many of the Black musicians I know from the city (including Stas THEE Boss and OCNotes)—and many Black musicians I know from elsewhere—the church community is the initial access point for quite a few young Black people captivated by music. The harmonies of the choir, the improvisation of the instrumentalists, and if you were part of the style of church that would get truly rowdy, listening to the church band winding up while members caught the Holy Ghost.
It’s difficult to really explain that phenomenon to people unaccustomed to the rhythms of the Black church, but when I was a child, it was the most fascinating part of weekly service on Sunday. I would regularly observe men running up and down the aisles and dancing furiously while sweating through their white dress shirts. There would be middle-aged women jumping up and down as high as they possibly could—and others whipping their hair back (more often than not held in place immaculately by wig glue) into a Jesus-inspired fervor. This was all set to a repeating motif that is essentially the foundation of what record labels like Stax were built on.
(You could only imagine my disappointment when I found out that not every church worshiped in this manner.)
Shepherd’s family—like many of their milieu—were deeply involved in the church organizational structure to the point where it was essentially a full-time job. “My family,” Shepherd says, “we had a point of service and that was our family culture. Everybody in my family had a job [at church]; it was a part of our workday. On Sundays, we would [get] up as a family at seven o’clock. We’d be in the car. My dad was going to work; he was a deacon. My mom was going to work; she was a Sunday School educator. One of my sisters was an usher. My brother tried to be an usher for a while, but he was the boy, so he kinda did whatever he wanted to do.”
Shaina was the youngest of her siblings, so she was expected to eventually take on a role in the church when she was old enough. She tried her hand at being an usher. Then, she attempted Youth Services, but said she was getting bullied too much, so she was given a place to work with the younger children. Eventually, she got into the church choir after studying under one of her older sisters, who she cites as the most talented musician in the church (and is now a mother and a high school principal).
So, how does a girl who grew up in a staunchly Christian household, whose entire community could be found in the church she attended, become one of the Northwest’s most talented and sought-after rock singers?
“Oh, I had secrets,” Shepherd says with a mischievous giggle. She was introduced to a widely-regarded millennial version of “the Devil’s music”—alternative rock—through the gateway pass millions of people used to gain entry into the culture of the wider world: a library card.
“I would walk to the library and I would be in the CD section,” says Shepherd. “I would be looking at everything. [I’d see album art and] I’d be like, ‘Ooh, this lady’s got her shirt off. Let me listen to this!’” She tells me that she was once given a purple boombox for Christmas when she was in middle school, and after her parents went to sleep, she would listen to her library bounty on a pair of headphones. Rock music was a private solace.
Describing Shaina Shepherd as a soul singer is accurate if we’re talking about “soul” as a spiritual disposition. But by the time she discovered Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, she was already well-versed in Screaming Trees and Soundgarden. “The way Chris Cornell sang,” she says, “it was like what I grew up with at church.”
Early in our conversation, I asked Shepherd if her parents were strict. At first, her reply was a mock-steely glance followed by a long sip of coffee. That pretty much said what I needed to know, but she elaborated.
Outside of the church, her mom was a teacher and her dad went from a position in the military to one as a federal intelligence agent. Before moving to Tacoma—in part a military community due to Joint Base Lewis-McChord (the biggest military base on the West Coast) being just south of the city—Shepherd’s parents lived east. Her father was originally from New York City and her paternal grandfather was Ferdinand Shepherd, who she notes was the first-ever African American cardiovascular surgeon. Her mother, of Barbadian heritage, grew up in Miami, which is where her parents met.
When Shepherd’s parents moved to the Tacoma area, she says, “They came here together with basically nothing and started popping out kids every year.”
Shepherd says her parents moving west was a direct product of the Great Migration—where between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South (which, of course, extended to the pre- and post-Civil Rights Movement era) for opportunities in the Northeast, Midwest, West Coast, and Pacific Northwest. And there was a decent amount of opportunity for Black people in this region, whether it was working for the United States Military or Boeing. (Fewer opportunities were provided outside of the Military Industrial Complex, but that line of commentary could fill its own feature.) “One of my favorite places to go is Enterprise, Oregon,” Shepherd says. “It’s the most integrated small town I’ve ever seen, because it’s built out of a Black-centric logging town.”
The Great Migration as a conversational topic led to Shepherd talking to me about the limitations of being described as an “alternative Black artist” here in the Northwest. It’s obviously a subject the two of us know very well; the idea that because we have references and inspirations that lie outside of the framework of “traditional” (read: stereotypical) Blackness, people like us scan as “alternative” in this region. Even in the year 2025, smack-dab in the center of a decade where Andre 3000 recorded an ambient jazz album with flute as its central instrument, Tyler the Creator has fully become one of this generation’s most viable pop stars (while possessing a visual aesthetic closer to Wes Anderson than anything else), and Donald Glover has been favorably compared to David Lynch.
“I feel way more at home in Dallas/Fort Worth or Denver,” says Shepherd. “Even Raleigh, North Carolina is dope!”
We notice the difference between existing as ourselves here and cities with more robust Black populations—like Chicago or Memphis—where, in our own hometown, we’re seen as “unique” (a softer way to describe someone as “weird”), but in places where Blackness is not othered in the wider sense of culture, we are simply Black people. That recognition hits different when you’re from a place where it’s common to meet white people who can conceivably reach adulthood without being on a first-name basis with a single Black person.
Shepherd says, “It’s just people people-ing and having the experience of people-ing together—and it [becomes] less about the fragility of everybody. Not just white people, but everybody’s fragility."
Shepherd dove deeper into music as she entered high school, while acknowledging it was a dark period in her life. She had moved to New York—her grandmother lived in Bed Stuy with “a couple Black people on one side of the street and Hasidic [Jewish] people on the other”—and back to Tacoma. Her siblings were coming of age and moving out of their parents’ house, and her social life was quiet. She kept good grades at Curtis High School and became an exemplary clarinet player, which led to her being introduced to the school choir. “Music was given to me as a gift,” Shepherd says about the silver lining which appeared during those dreary, grey high school years.
Receiving a music scholarship to Central Washington University, she lived and attended school in Ellensburg for two years, before dropping out. She then moved back to New York, and in the span of about four years, got married, got divorced, and returned to Western Washington. She decided it would be best if she lived in Seattle, which turned out pretty rough at first.
“I was on the street,” Shepherd reveals. “I was just looking to start over. I couldn’t afford to live in New York. I didn’t want to be around my family [there] at the time and I didn’t want to be around my [then-]partner. I wanted to come home.”
She missed her parents, but staying with them proved to be untenable at that moment. So, after a week, she grabbed a few things and took the Sound Transit 594 from Tacoma to Seattle. Shepherd couch-surfed, “spent a whole summer outside,” worked odd jobs, and suggested to me that she did everything she could to not have to engage in sex work. She checked the Craigslist music classified ads to see if there was a band she could join. Eventually, she answered an ad on the site to be a backing vocalist for a group called Global Heat.
According to Shepherd, Global Heat were playing a lot of corporate gigs and were making decent money in that realm. She jokes, “If you ever really want to roast Shaina Shepherd, go ahead and go on YouTube and look up Global Heat. There was a music video I made with these guys. They’re wonderful people, the band. But the video is humiliating.”
During the shoot for the video Shaina Shepherd doesn’t want you to see—*cue news exposé bumper music*—she met a guitarist “who was just pretending to play guitar.” His name was Matt Williams. He was impressed by Shepherd’s singing and invited her to audition for his band at the time, which was called Tragic Clam. (“Their singer moved to Portland to chase a boy,” Shepherd quips.)
In the warehouse that served as the band’s practice space, they passed around a bottle of Bulleit bourbon (before the myriad allegations of discrimination were levied against the brand’s parent company) and worked through some songs. That process inevitably led to working on new music together, which then led to the idea of just starting over as a completely new band. And that’s how Bearaxe was born.
Bearaxe came into the Seattle rock scene at an interesting moment. By the time they released their Last Call EP in 2018, there were nearly a dozen rock bands in the city with Black members. The Black Tones were lighting up stages around town, on the strength of their freshly-released debut single “The Key of Black (They Want Us Dead).” Black Ends were playing DIY venues and punk houses all over the region. Maya Marie (now the frontperson of the Maya Experience) was arguably the scene’s best-kept secret in her band the Black Chevys. And, believe it or not, there were a few other bands with Black members that didn’t have the word “black” in their name!
A little less idiosyncratic than early Black Ends and largely more polished than the Chevys, Bearaxe slotted very nicely alongside the Tones as prospective heirs to the Seattle rock throne. It obviously helped that they had an utterly phenomenal singer, but the band that backed her was very adept at providing a good backdrop for Shepherd to display her show-stopping power and charisma as a vocalist. Bearaxe were heavy enough not to be overpowered by their singer and could switch from downtempo to uptempo on a dime. Also, crucially, the bluesy, boozy energy of Bearaxe wasn’t just a cool aesthetic.
“I never had a drink in my life until I was 22 years old,” Shepherd says, “and then I went to a club the same night and I was terrified and hot and sweaty and angry. And then when I joined Bearaxe, these guys were pounding it out [drinking] and it was a space where I had traced the potential of alcoholism—where I was becoming inebriated [and] being able to access these inner demons that I had never dealt with. Never had therapy, had a lot of traumas and never did any work, and had spent a lot of time masking and holding in my thoughts. And all of a sudden, it was just this place of freedom and virility that I had access to. And I became obsessed with it, obsessed with that feeling.”
Shepherd says she put all of those demons into the songs she created with the other members of Bearaxe, whom she described as “real working American kids” with tough, working-class jobs.
“They were just as angry about that as I was,” says Shepherd. “Because we were promised we would have an opportunity [for prosperity as adults in the world] and we were getting stuck in patterns.”
Frequently describing Bearaxe as a team, Shepherd raved about how easy it was to work with them and write songs together. She compares it to singing in church, where the vocalist is in musical dialogue with the band.
“When I heard Matt Williams’ guitar,” she says, “I recognized Zappa and I recognized Roy Orbison. I recognized Kim Thayil. I recognized them in his references.” And she would ultimately lean in the direction he was going, to support his musical ideas in her own way to keep things cohesive. Shepherd speaks very fondly of the idea of music as a tapestry of influences rather than merely a straight homage. She notes, “It’s more the layering of [the artists] who have made us and what is the validation that we [as a group] should exist right now.”
In the early days of the pandemic, Bearaxe broke up, got back together, and broke up again. Shepherd describes her time near the end of the band’s first run as “a super-toxic relationship.” She and Williams had personal conflicts,stemming from beefs happening within their immediate musical community. “And that beef challenged all of our personal lives,” says Shepherd.
And then, the lockdown period of the pandemic happened and Bearaxe couldn’t practice, couldn’t work on anything. “And everybody started kind of imploding and—I’m just going to be honest about it,” she says.
“All of us started having breakdowns emotionally, mentally.” Shepherd took a step back from Bearaxe and her friends were hurt, even though they didn’t share their pain with her. (“They were men,” she explains simply.)
“I was like, ‘Okay, I’m Shaina Shepherd now and I’m gonna do this.’”
Shepherd’s solo career started with a need to stand in front on her own; not as part of a team or a collective, but as the author of her own legacy. She admits there was some ego involved in this decision, but a big part of finding success as an artist is harnessing an unshakable belief in your talents.
An early highlight of Shepherd’s solo career was the summer 2020 single “The Virus.” In my premiere of the single for KEXP, I described Shepherd as having “a lilt evoking Nina Simone on one too many cups of Café Vita double-shots.” Over the next couple years, I watched as she rocked the stage at THING Festival in the daytime heat of Fort Worden and, three months later, delivered an absolutely arresting performance at Freakout Festival with Acid Tongue, singing her collaborative track with the band, “Suffering for You.” In the only Northwest festival actively striving to resurrect the concept of the rock star in earnest, Shepherd looked, moved, and—perhaps most importantly—sounded like the biggest rock star on Earth for one evening. (On the night, I mentioned to a few friends and loved ones that her time onstage felt like Tina Turner resurrected.)
I asked Shepherd if she felt she grew as a performer during the first leg of her solo run. “No,” she replied. “I grew up as a person.”
Shepherd admitted to not being entirely focused in the early years of her music career, and she credits writing music for herself as the process that helped her flourish as a human being. The exercise was challenging for her—not being able to mask or slip into a more confident alter ego as she had in Bearaxe—but ultimately, when she began writing songs on piano and getting to learn the instrument better, “it made me reflect on the spiritual nature of myself and what I’m really doing here.”
The growth Shepherd had undertaken while writing her first spate of solo material was what she would need, given what came after. Namely, the attention she garnered from stepping onstage with the living members of Soundgarden and singing their songs for one night.
For a SMooCH (Seattle Musicians for Children’s Hospital) benefit in late 2024, Nudedragons (get it?) played a full set of Soundgarden tunes. Shepherd insists that even with her successes as an artist, even though she regards Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron as friends (and, in Cameron’s case, a full-on collaborator), she is not a peer of the musicians she discovered as a youngster sneaking CDs home from the library.
She says, “They put so much work in and I see how hard it really is to grind and make a band, a project, a vision work for… five years is all we got for Bearaxe Version 1. These guys have been doing it for generations. That’s what it takes to cement your space and legacy in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’m not a peer to those guys.”
But with new music (Matt and Shaina, Shepherd and Cameron’s duo, released a self-titled EP earlier this year), a new iteration of Bearaxe on the way, and a cookbook coming up, she sure is catching up fast.
“I wanna get my book out this year and I wanna get Bearaxe back on the road,” Shepherd tells me when I ask her what’s on the horizon for her. The new version of Bearaxe—featuring, among others, stalwart guitarist Shaun Crawford, who Shepherd praises for his “country-ass, Black-ass, weirdo-ass energy”—will be playing Bite of Seattle and its Redmond equivalent, CHOMP!, this summer.
“I’m just gonna go back to that amazing, free-flowing art space of psychedelic rock and roll,” Shepherd says. “I need that for myself to feel centered. It feels like therapy for me.”
First things first, Youth Riot Records deserves big-time props for becoming one of the most reliable stewards for Northwest music in just a few short years. The label has released great debuts from the Maya Experience and Black Ends, the most recent album from Wimps (my favorite Northwest band of at least the past decade at least), and—for those of us who pine for the heyday of Seattle’s 2010s DIY scene and the great Help Yourself Records—reissued the full catalog of Mommy Long Legs. Additionally, Youth Riot is keeping the dream of 2018 alive by bringing the great Casual Hex back into the spotlight.
A sequel to their awesome LP Zig Zag Lady Illusion—released seven years ago, in the thick of the Seattle punk/indie scene your friendly millennial musicians and critics still get wistful over—Zig Zag Lady Illusion II finds Jessie Odell, Erica Miller, and Keegan Wiltshire (now all located in different hubs of the Northwest: Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland) exploring the dark corners of Casual Hex’s sound in higher fidelity, but no interest to soften their sharp corners.
Many of the songs boast a loopy, psychedelic edge (not least of which is the absolute banger “Head Control”) and a heaviness that slots well with kindred spirits like TERMINATor—and is at this point synonymous with Seattle rock music. Call it “post-punk” if you must, I’d rather call it post-apocalyptic.
As I wrote to close February’s Throwaway Style feature on Suede God, “In addition to being talented, endowed by his elders with a creative spirit, having a substantial work ethic and a sharp intellectual curiosity, AJ Suede is a seeker.” That’s how he can drop multiple albums a year that all have different themes, aesthetics, and musical ideas.
Throne Away might be Suede’s most musically experimental and rhythmically adventurous album, from the jazzy shuffle of opener “Don’t You Go Hollow” to quasi-grime bounce of “Autonomy.” For the longtime Suede heads looking for a good, slow groove, you won't find yourself underserved here with songs like “Artery” and “Minmaxxing.” (The latter is particularly good for the Venn diagram between Suede listeners and avid gamers.)
As Suede continues to move farther outside of the boundaries of what people deem as “rap music,” he proves that what rap really is can’t always be found in just the samples or the drum patterns, but in the soul of the work.
By this time last year, Olympia weirdo/budget-punk legends the gobs had one “full-length” (their eight-song, 12-minute self-titled LP) and one EP already released, with another on the way. Astonishingly, obsgay uleray is the gobs’ first release of 2025, which can only mean we’re in for an onslaught of bizarre punk tunes for the second-half of the year.
If you’ve listened to a gobs release before, you know what you’re in for: warpspeed, synthy, fucked-up-sounding punk with garbled solos and downright poetic song titles like “bad day to be a beer” and “do i look like i DILLIGAF, man?”
Lord Olo, the masked man who moved to Seattle from LeBron James’s hometown of Akron, Ohio, came to town with an already-distinguished pedigree and immediately found himself in league with the great artists of the Northwest underground rap scene.
For the second installment of his Demon Slayer series with the great Televangel, Olo alternately shrouds himself in mystery and offers nakedly honest testimonials from his life—some of which are excruciatingly painful. He also happens to deliver most of them with his most charismatic vocals to date. The backdrop for his screeds spring from the weirdest parts of Televangel’s brain, as the Portland-based underground legend delivers a truly psychedelic collection of beats for Olo to alchemize different flows and styles.
All in all, Demon Slayer 2 is a surprising and thrilling addition to the pantheon of the very best hip-hop albums to come out of the Northwest this decade so far.
Mia Zapata, vocalist for the Gits, was one of the best singers to ever call Seattle home. Martin Douglas dives into her talent and the albums the band released in the early 1990s.
Acid Tongue share the latest single from their forthcoming album Arboretum featuring Shaina Shepherd
One of Seattle's brightest singer/songwriters pens an anxious tune about our current cultural moment. Martin Douglas explores.
