As 2025 comes to an end, we’re digging back into our archives to revisit some of our favorite stories of the year. See them all here.
When I walked into the Vera Project on a rainy Sunday morning, I spotted musicians whose work I’ve followed for years—Shaina Shepherd, Chris Martin of Kinski, Ben Verellen of Helms Alee, Bree McKenna of Tacocat, Shaun Crawford of Acid Tongue… But they weren’t onstage. They looked as sleepy as I felt, sitting in folding chairs on the showroom floor under the club’s overhead fluorescent lights.
It was barely 9 a.m. on October 27, just days before Halloween—and, even scarier, the 2024 Presidential Election—and 20 musicians from around the Pacific Northwest were coming together to kick off Rock Lottery 13.
Rock Lottery works like this: Twenty musicians are split into four bands of five by pulling names out of a hat. The new groups are given a bag of snacks, access to a practice space, and the directive to prepare at least three songs to be performed 12 hours later in front of a live audience. (They’re allowed one cover song—the organizers aren’t monsters.) The first Rock Lottery was hosted by the Good/Bad Art Collective in Denton, Texas, in 1997. Since then, dozens of installments—some official, some not so much—have been hosted all over the country in Denton, Seattle, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Louisville, and beyond. Seattle’s last Rock Lottery was at the Crocodile on January 25, 2020. The Before Times.
