Behind the Music Scene – August 2026

IF YOU’VE SEEN Nick Garrett-Powell this year—chances are you have, since he plays more than 200 shows per year—you’ve probably assumed that what you’re seeing, either as half (with Andy Casad) of the Fret Drifters, with Shae Celine as Nick & Shae, doing his mesmerizing solo shows or pitching-in with a number of local acts, is a finished product.

You’re wrong.

What you’re seeing is indeed the product of a long journey, begun in a musical family and including stop-offs at SOU’s classical voice program, the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, where he learned Audio Engineering, and almost two decades playing locally. Nick Garrett-Powell is one of the best-known musicians in Southern Oregon but he’s not content to rest on those laurels. Far from it. He’s got plans; maybe not plans to become a rock star but plans no less ambitious than that.

What life so far has created in Nick Garrett-Powell is a polymath, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist who’s part technician, part mad scientist and part evangelist, driven by the philosophy of kaizen, or “continuous improvement,” learned during his many years practicing martial arts. “It’s the idea that your only competition is who you were yesterday,” he explains. “It’s the fundamental motivator of why I’m still up practicing the guitar at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

He calls himself a “nerd first, musician second, entertainer third,” and his greater vision is growth—“bigger concerts, bigger stages”—but he’s not interested in becoming the Bill Graham of Jackson County and getting rich off of his peers. When he looks into the future, Nick Garrett-Powell sees a musician’s utopia—a weekly arts magazine, live music venues, resources at the ready for musicians to play and record—all co-operatively owned by musicians for musicians with the cooperation of local businesses.

“I want to see the resurgence of a real arts scene,” he says, “with places to rapidly make human music—no A.I.”

For that to happen, he says, everyone needs to be on the same page. “Music is a mom-and-pop business,” he begins. “When you come and see entertainment you’re also supporting the winery, the food truck, the bartenders and waitstaff, everyone who’s trying to make this happen. The future of music in Southern Oregon is to get the local businesses involved at the core level with the musicians.”

It’s difficult not to get swept up in Garrett-Powell’s passion, whether he’s outlining the future of music in Southern Oregon, recalling how the Fret Drifters came to be, discussing “The Key,” a pending invention that aims to “change the way guitarists view the information on the fingerboard,” or enthusiastically laying out the origins of “Guitar-B-Que,” a yearly potluck gathering of musicians he began while living in L.A. that’s become a can’t-miss for players in the Rogue Valley. “I wanted to get my hip-hop friends and my church friends together,” he says, simply. “I just felt like it would solve everybody’s musical woes.” Many bands have been born at Guitar-B-Que, he says.

Powell says his ambitions far not short of “doing for music what Bill Nye did for science.” He wants to play, to organize, to innovate and to educate and in the end, he says, perhaps ununnecessarily since it’s already obvious, “I’m 100% sold out to music for music’s sake.”