Victorian art

Like the members of local bands Southern Belle and The Hugs, singer-songwriter Nick Caceres is an alumnus of Portland’s public high schools. Caceres started playing guitar at age 15, in part encouraged by his older brother. Soon, Caceres was writing songs and posting them on MySpace.

“Pretty much everything has come to me through MySpace,” he says, recalling how he made connections in the Portland music scene.

He speaks enthusiastically about his peers’ projects and his first exposure to professional recording.

“There’s something going on at Klickitat Band Camp,” Caceres says. He cites resident producer Shay Scott as a force behind the musical development of many young Portland songwriters. “Shay knows what makes a good pop song. He’ll say ‘build a bridge there’ and work with bands to get a sound.” “What’s going on in Portland right now feels kind of cosmic, just, this creative energy. It’s like, Seattle in the 1990s. Sometimes a place has a lot of exciting things going on,” Caceres says. Caceres clearly thrives in his current surroundings, but has one foot firmly rooted in the past. He points to the French Revolution as another instance of a sort of creative watershed.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m comparing the Portland music scene to the French Revolution,” he says, “but it’s the same idea – a bunch of really talented people in the same time and place.”

Caceres’ facility at recognizing historical patterns, and ability to superimpose the past on the present plays out in his music to great effect. Caceres records folk music under his own name.

Much of his eponymous output is musically inspired by or takes place in the early 1900s, and it’s obvious that he’s done his research. His is no arbitrary fascination. He identifies the 1900s as a turning point–the beginning of a transition into the world we live in today, and worthy of attention for the personal struggles that transpired against this changing backdrop.

“We’re coming to a point now where everything will change,” he sings on “Henry Ford’s Streets”, which may be the best example of Caceres’ attempts to understand the present through history.

He appreciates and understands the past, but does not seem to romanticize it or dismiss progress. The song ends with Caceres singing frankly about his confusion and alienation.

Teen angst is rarely so introspective, universal and steeped in historical reflection. There is a rawness to Caceres’ folk output that is unusual in the Portland scene, where many bands seem to aim for a particular sound, effect or experience, often with the omission of any real emotion.

“I think my biggest growth as a songwriter came from stuff that had a lot of emotion in it,” Caceres says. “It sort of allowed me to not feel inferior by just writing a song on the acoustic guitar. So something like ‘New Slang’, by The Shins–suddenly, there were these great songs popping out that tons of people loved, and were famous songs or whatever, and I felt like if they could do that with just an acoustic guitar, then I wanted to try and make something that good.”

Though his folk project has progressed in fits and starts, Caceres is certainly nearing that point. Along with psychedelic side-project Grattitillium, Caceres is pushing the envelope of his creative abilities while a cultural zeitgeist hovers in the wings, waiting for an opportune moment to sweep him up.

The slow crawl of this process might be frustrating to other artists but to Caceres, who is so heavily attuned to history, it is an inevitable price of admission into the timeline he loves.