Eliot Chamberlain is a folk/rock guitarist and songwriter based in Portland, Oregon.
Growing up in San Jose, California, Eliot was always drawn to music of one kind or another, but it was in 2004 on an airplane over the pacific ocean that Eliot’s life was changed forever. This was the era when airplanes all had music channels built into the armrests and everybody had cheap headphones passed out to them. While surfing through airplane radio stations, Eliot discovered some kind of “Hits of the 60’s” channel and for the first time really heard songs like “I Can See For Miles,” “Magic Carpet Ride,” and probably most consequentially, “Like A Rolling Stone.”
At the same time that he was falling in love with old rock and roll music, he was also getting into bluegrass, taking banjo lessons as a teenager from banjo virtuoso Sonia Shell, of the group Sidesaddle. Eliot began writing music, taking inspiration from sleepless nights spent skating and wandering the hills of the Bay Area, eventually moving to Santa Cruz and joining a string band that turned out to be the embryonic version of the group Steep Ravine.
Then in 2013 Eliot moved up north to Portland to focus on writing and making coffee. His 2020 eponymous album is the work he’s most proud of, feeling that he finally managed to get back in touch with something deep and personally resonant, while at the same time writing songs that are very much for the people in his life, and the strange state of the world we find ourselves in today. Always inspired by that late night feeling, he continues to get much less sleep than he should.
Since 2020 Eliot has been playing very regularly as half of the folk duo Chamberlain/Gonzalez (check in for news on live shows on their instagram @gonzolain). They put out a record in August 2021, available here.