With all women on the bill, this concert has something to say about the music biz

As a bluegrass musician, Kristen Grainger is used to being the only woman in a concert. If there are any. 

“In the bluegrass world, it always has been five guys dressed alike, standing around one mic,” she said. “These bluegrass festivals, the poster goes up and they’ve got pictures of all the players. And there’s not one woman in the lineup.”

That disparity is a direct motivation behind “She’s Speaking Live,” a concert series for Women’s History Month that puts Grainger and other Oregon women musicians on stage. 

Eugene will be the third “She’s Speaking Live” concert this year, after stops in Portland and Salem. The Eugene show, with musicians from the worlds of bluegrass, folk, jazz, country, rock and gospel, also doubles as a benefit concert for the GRRRLZ Rock Music & Arts Festival.

“She’s Speaking” started not as a concert, but as a digital, pandemic-era project from three Oregon women singer-songwriters: Beth Wood of Sisters, Bre Gregg of Portland, and Grainger, of Salem. Grainger was dismayed after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020, she said, and connected with Wood and Gregg over what the three musicians could do to mourn.

A tribute concert was off the table. They instead started a YouTube channel, She’s Speaking, and reached out to women songwriters, asking them to write a song about a woman who inspired them. The project was named after former vice president Kamala Harris’ memorable comments after being interrupted by Mike Pence during the 2020 vice presidential debates, where she repeatedly asserted “I’m speaking.” 

“It turned out people really were anxious to hear women’s voices,” Grainger said. “They wanted to hear women’s thoughts, women’s ideas, their stories.”

Halie Loren, a Eugene-based jazz singer-songwriter and a vocalist in the local band The Sugar Beets, was a contributor to the YouTube project with her song “Sisters.” 

Loren will be the guest artist for the Eugene stop this weekend. She hadn’t been able to attend one of the “She’s Speaking Live” shows before this year, but had heard plenty about last year’s Eugene concert.

“People were raving about it for weeks afterwards,” Loren said. “That rarely happens with shows. People tend to see something, whether it’s lovely or not, and they forget about it. But it kept getting referenced. It was a powerful thing for the people in attendance.”

A call to ‘Book More Women’

The concert has moved away from the initial idea of ballads about specific women, and instead is a showcase of women musicians and an all-woman lineup, which can be a rarity in the music world.

Performers for “She’s Speaking Live” in Eugene are all Oregon women artists: Grainger, Loren, Wood, Gregg, as well as Crystal Lariza, Ashleigh Flynn and the Riveters, Marilyn Keller and Jenny Conlee of The Decemberists.

Grainger pointed to the famed 1990s music festival Lilith Fair and the Book More Women movement as motivators for “She’s Speaking Live.” Book More Women compiles annual, often glaring, statistics on women in the industry: In 2025, only 22% of musicians booked across nine major music festivals were women.

“Men own the venues,” Grainger said. “Men run the festivals. Men own the labels. They are the bookers. They’re the promoters. They decide who gets airtime. They decide who’s booked and how big a font they’re going to be in on the poster. We are not really in charge of where we play and who gets to hear us.”

For Loren, the rarity of an all-woman lineup like “She’s Speaking Live” speaks for itself.

“In all my years of playing music professionally all over the world, I have never once in my life had the opportunity to play at something like this. I’ve never had the opportunity to play in an all women collaborative event,” Loren said. “I think that says something.”

If you go

When: The Eugene stop of “She’s Speaking Live” is Sunday, March 8, 7:30 to 10 p.m.
Where: Unity of the Valley, 3912 Dillard Road, Eugene
Tickets: Available online for $29.50