“You need to go to shows where you don’t know the band,” Stacie Willoughby says over tea on a rainy, Santa Cruz day. As I think about the meaning of her words, she sits back, takes a sip of her peach tea and adds, “It’s good for you.” It’s the advice of a woman who knows; a woman who understands the importance of creativity; a woman who, through her poster art has, almost single-handedly, created the visual identity for a live-music community.

If you’ve been in or around the Bay Area music scene anytime in the last decade, you have almost certainly encountered Willoughby’s work. She has produced a steady stream of posters for shows ranging from small, last-minute house shows to huge, multi-day festivals in the forest, and everything in between. The scope of her portfolio is mind-boggling; page after page of posters, announcing performances by some of the most interesting and cred-heavy artists around, including Will Oldham, Fleet Foxes, Stephen Malkmus, Bert Jansch, Sleepy Sun, Mudhoney, Black Francis and Animal Collective; and that’s just scratching the surface. Willoughby is, quite literally, identifying, furthering and documenting an era of music.

And, she’s doing it all by hand, from her bedroom, one show at a time. “I sit in my chair, with a board on my lap and just have at it,” she says about her technique. She used to pencil, ink and then color her posters, but rarely does so anymore, and when asked how much in advance she plans out her drawings, she responds, “Not at all.” Willoughby is in the enviable position of being able to let her creativity and vision guide the image. “I’ve been really lucky,” she says, “because I don’t generally get assigned images. I usually just start.” For her, having a pre-conceived notion of what an image needs to be, takes her out of her comfort zone. “When I have something that I know it has to end up as, it’s terrifying,” she says, “because I don’t know what it’s going to end up as.”

When Willoughby started designing flyers and posters for shows, it was because there was an obvious need. “My first posters were for house shows in Santa Cruz,” she says, “because we didn’t have any way to get the word out. The internet wasn’t that important yet, and people would just scrawl the name of bands on paper.” But Willoughby saw that posters could be great vehicles for spreading the word. “I like to draw,” she says, “and I was interested in conveying the information in the most eye-catching way possible.” So she started making posters for local bands like Residual Echoes, Loyal Sons and Daughters, Frog Eyes, and Comets on Fire, and the more she made, the more in-demand her talents became. “People wanted me to do it and I wanted to do it and I got to be a part of something that was fun,” she says, and reminisces about the DIY freedom of the house shows. “It was all about making a situation that you could exhibit your art without other people OK-ing it.”

Meanwhile, down in Big Sur, a music-lover named Britt Govea had started putting on shows under the name FolkYeah, and needed a poster artist. When Willoughby, who had developed a reputation for creating engaging and eerily beautiful drawings met Govea, a new chapter in her poster-making story began. “I just lucked out,” she says. “It was a situation of being in the right place at the right time.” Govea was quietly promoting shows and creating a community around the music that he loved, and he started calling on Willoughby to provide the posters for his events. What began as a trickle of shows turned into a stream and as FolkYeah grew, so did the connection that was made between Willoughby’s art and great shows. A Willoughby poster can be spotted across the room, and will, most certainly, catch the eye of any music lover in-the-know, as Govea has presented an incomparable parade of amazing, somewhat under-the-radar artists, and created a community around the music that he loves. As Willoughby says, “Britt wanted to create an environment that he wanted to be in.”

The more recognizable Willoughby’s art became, the more jobs she was offered, and what started with flyers for local shows has gone worldwide. “I mostly work in the San Francisco to Los Angeles region,” she says, “but I’ve done art for English bands, Ukranian bands, French bands, Japanese bands, Australian fashion designers; it’s definitely reaching across an ocean and connecting to other people.”

And the wave of hand-made posters that has emerged in the wake of Willoughby’s success? “I’m always stoked when someone is making an artistic rock poster,” she says. “Things used to be made by hand; you could feel that a person made [a] sign and I just don’t feel that from all the signs and advertisements that I see.”

Willoughby, whose art has promoted and celebrated bands from around the world, and helped to weave a community of music-lovers together, sees posters as an essential element of live-music. “Posters generate excitement and give visuals to a sound,” she says, “which is always exponential in its return.”

Visit notesfrombelow.com to see more of Stacie Willoughby’s work.
For more information on FolkYeah concerts, check out folkyeah.com.