PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

PALMER — It was a trying set of circumstances that led Naomi Hooley to Portland, Ore.

“Before I left Alaska I was in a band for almost four years. We had taken ourselves pretty seriously, we were touring, we were opening for all the big name acts coming through,” Hooley said.

Her bandmates weren’t just people she played with, they were her friends. They lived near each other, were in each other’s weddings. They raised enough money touring in Alaska to go to Portland, Ore., and record an album.

“It wasn’t just a band, it was a family kind of unit and it just blew to bits within three days of spending $10,000,” Hooley said.

She and her bandmates had been talking about relocating to Portland, trying to take music seriously as a career. The dream of making an “honest stab” at it as a band was over.

After the band disintegrated, she had a conversation with her then-husband, who decided he didn’t want to move with her and actually also didn’t want to stay married.

“My whole life that I had known and that I had been working for for nine years was just up in smoke,” she said.

She was living in Juneau then and had a choice to make — do what she’d planned, but as a solo act or give up.

“I packed my dog and just moved to Portland with nothing lined up,” she said.

Hooley was born in Palmer, raised in the Valley and graduated from Wasilla High School.

Alaska, she said, still plays a big role in what she does. Some evidence of that: Palmer is the only place a person can buy her CD, before her CD release party in Portland Oct. 15. In fact, you can’t even get it online. Not yet, anyway.

But it’s available for sale at Side Kicks and Gifts, a shop across from Vagabond Blues on South Alaska Street in Palmer. As for why the CD is available there, Hooley said it’s a funny story that starts when Hooley and her touring band were going through a sound check before they played at the coffee house.

“The lady that owns that place was sitting in that shop with it open,” Hooley said. She came over to meet Hooley and told her, “All I’ve heard was your one sound check song, but I’ve already posted it on Facebook that everyone needs to come down here.”

Hooley said the show at Vagabond ended up being their best of the tour.

“Our absolute best show was Vagabond Blues in Palmer,” Hooley said. For the rest of the tour, if something went wrong, “we would just be like, ‘yeah, but at least we had Vagabond Blues.’”

Asked to describe her music, Hooley said that when pressed for time and forced to distill it she goes with “vintage piano pop.”

She said her influences are people like Jim Croce and Carole King. People have compared her to more modern artists like Neco Case or Adele. But those influences and comparisons don’t quite capture it. She mentioned a few more strains that run through the record.

“I was definitely raised in a religious setting for a lot of my life,” Hooley said. “That old gospel soul kind of stuff that comes out there sometimes.”

And: “Long Winter Night (track 5 on Great October) is on the verge of being country or Americana,” she said.

In short, she doesn’t write for any particular genre and has trouble classifying herself.

“Writing for me is like part of processing,” she said. “When I song-write I’m processing my own thoughts and my dreams. I don’t ever confine myself to a genre.”

She also doesn’t exactly confine herself to her professional pursuits. Music, for now at least, is a part-time gig. She does other work to get by. And she’s starting her own business, which surprised some of her friends in Oregon, since she’s only been on the ground there a year.

“That’s kind of how Alaskans do it, we kind of see what we need to do and we do it,” she said, recalling her response to their surprise.

The business and how it came about would probably also be familiar to those of us in the 49th state.

While out camping this summer she wound up buying a $600 bus and is now ripping out the seats and converting it to a second-hand store. Another word for “second-hand,” of course, is “vintage:” like her music.

Alaskans will probably find a lot of things to identify with on the album, such as cold afternoons and snowy winters. Hooley says a lot of the music draws from her own experiences, some of them recent. The trek to Portland plays a big role.

But while all of that is very specific to her, she said she thinks it’s universal. While driving through Dawson City, she said, she found three other people who, like her, had quit their jobs to pursue something they loved. One of them, a man named Gerhardt who was competing in a canoe race, summed it up for her, saying he knew there wouldn’t be anyone waiting to shake his hand or give him flowers at the end of the race; however, “At the end of my life I want to say to myself in the mirror, ‘Gerhardt, you did what you wanted to do.’”

She said it’s a theme of “pursing happiness at any cost.” Universal indeed.

“The story doesn’t just belong to me. There’s a lot of people living the same story with different details all over the world.”

Portland has proven to be a great place for her to live out that storyline.

“When I first came to Portland I kind of got encouraged because I saw incredible acts that I would never live up to, but I also saw really mediocre acts,” Hooley said. “I thought, ‘there’s got to be a little niche or a hole that I can fit into.’”

And, she said, she thinks she’s found it.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.