Isabeau Waia’u-Walker, at heart, is a storyteller and songsmith who unites vulnerable transparency with hypnotic melodies and harmonies that will remain in your mind long after the music has stopped playing. She is a breathtaking embodiment of potent paradox; her sound dubbed “bright gloom”, yet another nod to the dualities her music carries and communicates song by song. Hailing from the Hawaiian islands with its deep indigenous heart and steeped in the beautiful bustling expressions of Portland and the Northwest, she lives and creates in the tensions of cultures, race, and language, and the product is, and always has been, a type of tender fortress in a world of harsh realities.Her ethereal voice brings the perfect compliment to the earthy weightiness and real life grappling happening in her lyrics. To know and witness Isabeau and her music is to witness a most beautiful faithfulness to people, process, and the art of real life loving. This comes blazing forth in her music, as she welcomes you with aloha into her soul and shares both the triumphs and piercing heartaches of her own life with stunning concision. Her commitment to producing honest, vulnerable, poetic, and resonant music has already produced her EP “Better Metric” and two full length albums, “Body” and “Heavyweight”, and her third and highly anticipated EP “Cloudhunter”, recorded at The Center for Sound, Light and Color, is due this coming summer. She has toured the PNW with her own band, solo touring all over the country and Mexico, as well as extensive touring as a member of the band Y La Bamba. She also had the honor of recording a live session of her “Heavyweight” album at KEXP in 2024. Isabeau’s music is mellifluous and mature and invites you to engage in your own story, your own truth- it has a contagious kind of honesty to it, that feels like a deep question and a profound answer all at the same time.  She’s a taste and see deal, and once you listen, you’ll understand. 

written by Dawn Haweaʻokalani Maculam