Take Jack Horton, a Portland-based singer-songwriter whose path to folk-Americana included stops at Japanese law school, Tokyo piano bars, corporate boardrooms, and government offices. His latest EP, "Imperfections," feels like finding someone's private journal set to music. And that someone happens to write really, really well. The five-song collection opens with "Set Me Free," a piano-driven confession that might surprise anyone expecting typical breakup bitterness. Horton...

There is a specific kind of magic that happens when an artist decides to stop overthinking and starts feeling. For Joshua Pearlstein, that moment of clarity arrived in the form of a sleepless night and a single, urgent creative impulse. His latest single, “Wanna Dance”, is the result of that urgency, a track that feels less like a calculated career move and more like a...