Arts & Culture

On the rise: Alumna August Lee Stevens makes her way in the Bay Area music scene

August Lee Stevens’s music career has taken off since her time at UC Santa Cruz. Stevens wrote her first single in her dorm at UCSC and has gone on to perform at a Warriors playoff game, open for Smokey Robinson, and hold a residency at the SF Jazz Festival.

May 4, 2026

By Rachel Raiyani

August Lee Stevens (Merrill ’22) wasn’t even born when she started listening to music. 

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was the soundtrack to her mom’s pregnancy. Stevens came out grooving in rhythm, a debut that felt less like a beginning but more like it was her destiny. 

It was in Santa Cruz where Stevens college-freshman-self decided to pursue becoming a full-fledged musician. Now she’s about to open for the creator for one of her all-time favorite songs, Seals’ “Crazy”. 

Stevens’s father is a saxophonist and her mom grew up in Detroit during the Motown era. Songs by Stevie Wonder, Lauryn Hill, and Smokey Robinson made up the score to Stevens’s childhood. That background, coupled with her discovery of Hannah Montana, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé, rounded out her youth’s music experience. 

“I would go home, and I would write down the lyrics to my favorite Taylor Swift or Hannah Montana song and pretend that I was in a Disney movie writing my own music,” Stevens said. “After a while, I started to write my own lyrics and melodies.”

Stevens had already been playing the piano since she was six, and started learning the cello in her elementary school orchestra. When budget cuts meant that her school in Hercules was cutting the music program, Stevens was distraught but determined. 

With her parents’ help, she made a plan to apply to the Oakland School for the Arts (OSA). In her first audition, Stevens was rejected because she couldn’t read music. She had learned music through the Suzuki method, which promotes learning in an immersive way rather than technically. For a year, Stevens dedicated her time to learn how to sightread with help from her piano teacher, Laura Lee. On her second try, she was admitted. 

OSA modeled their curriculum like a conservatory. By the time Stevens had to choose a college, she was ready to explore life outside music. 

Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016 solidified Stevens’s interest in politics, international relations, and documentary film. Keeping in mind UCSC’s political history, with faculty emeriti like Angela Davis, she chose to stay close to the Bay for college. 

“I went to Santa Cruz with the thought that I wasn’t going to do music. In my second semester of my freshman year I was getting really sad and depressed. Santa Cruz is in the trees and it’s rainy in the winter, and I was in my Hozier era,” Stevens said. “I needed the music. Being in an environment where I was starting new and trying to form my identity as an adult, that’s what made me realize that I could go back to music.”

It was the last day of winter quarter in her freshman year. Most of the students had already vacated the dorms, and Stevens’s parents were at a Warriors game. 

“I was alone on my floor, and it was dark. I was also heartbroken because of boy problems, and as I was sitting there, I wrote a song,” Stevens said. “That was ‘Senses.’”

“Senses” was Stevens’s first single. She performed it at an open mic, and was approached by two strangers who said they loved her song. Dakil and Jake Lloyd ended up producing the track. Its release catalyzed Stevens’s musical momentum.

“I started performing, and I got booked a lot through word of mouth. During that time, I was getting booked for having only one song out, which was very cool,” Stevens said. “Santa Cruz was the first place I was really embraced as a performer.” 

Coming to Santa Cruz, for Stevens, was a culture shock. Black students made up less than three percent of UCSC’s student body. She found community through campus organizations.

At UCSC’s African American Resource and Cultural Center’s Welcome Black BBQ, Stevens found the African American Theater Arts Troupe (AATAT), an organization that was a part of the greater Cultural Arts and Diversity Resource Center (CADrc) led by Professor Don Williams. Stevens joined under the guise that one day she’d be able to act in the Broadway musical Dreamgirls. Though she didn’t star in Dreamgirls, Stevens starred in a handful of plays put on by both organizations. (AATAT later produced Dreamgirls in 2026.)

As she took on more leadership roles in AATAT and CADrc, she started doing more advocacy-related work for Black students and students of color on campus. Stevens co-authored a budget referendum to retain Black faculty and establish permanence for AATAT. 

“We were siloed into student resource centers, but we weren’t an actual department in theater. More than 30 years in the making, Mr. Williams is now a faculty member, and AATAT has a class,” Stevens said. “It was a lot about making these much-needed community spaces for students of color permanent.”

These lessons stayed with Stevens after UC Santa Cruz, landing her a job as a financial aid coordinator for California College of the Arts. Back in the Bay, Stevens started building her musical network again from the bottom up. 

“Having a space to go [CADrc] where we felt like we could build on our creativity was a crucial point of growth for me,” Stevens said. “As an unknown artist stepping into the industry, I thought about how to approach negotiations and how to reach out to different magazines. I used what I learned to advocate for myself as an artist.”

Present at open mics, Stevens found people who connected her with other artists and venues, and even some of her current band members. Her presence and depth as an artist kept growing with the community she was forming.

Through OSA classmates like singer and songwriter Satya, Stevens found her current manager, Phil Green. She also discovered the Women’s Audio Mission, an organization that awarded Stevens an artist residency and stipend to record her EP Better Places.

Since her time at UC Santa Cruz, Stevens has opened for Smokey Robinson and performed the National Anthem at multiple Warriors games, including a playoff game, and she just performed her second residency with the SF Jazz Festival. Earlier this year, she also released an album of her songs and covers that she performed, Live at the Troubadour, a venue in West Hollywood known for launching the careers of folk artists like Joni Mitchell and Carole King. 

She’s working on her newest project, inspired by a thesis project she worked on at UC Santa Cruz. In this ode to her family, Stevens is basing the project off the Great Migration, which brought a lot of Southern Black folk to the West Coast. 

When her dad moved back to Louisiana to be with his mom in 2019, Stevens found herself going back and forth between California and Louisiana, reconnecting with her family. 

“I started reflecting on my own connection with this idea of migration, and of families living together, and family itself,” Stevens said. “I have my chosen family out here, but I thought a lot about what it means to have a deeper bond with someone you don’t really know.”

The songs in this album are an evolution of Stevens’s music progress in the last six years. 

“It’s hard to not throw out the older stuff because I feel like I am more developed and experienced as a songwriter. But it’s also exciting to be able to look at that because it is almost like a time stamp and reflection of what I was feeling at that moment,” Stevens said. “I can hold onto the memories of my family to inform the newer stuff I am writing.”

Stevens’s music is constantly evolving, and she uses her performances to experiment with different iterations of her released music. For her, music is something that is living and breathing and can always be improved, revisited, and recontextualized.

That growth was shown in her most recent SF Jazz Residency, which took place in early April.

“I’ve had a lot of demanding shows and new spaces to step into as an artist. I want to make sure that is reflected. That’s the real reason I’ve been drilling so hard,” Stevens said. “I want to show the room, as an appreciation of everything I’ve done in the past year and as an appreciation of the band, the other gigs, and the people who have invested in me.”

Stevens’s parents are her biggest inspirations. With gratitude, Stevens attributes her music success to their joy and, of course, never letting her quit piano. She tried to quit many times. 

Stevens also paid homage to many of her OSA classmates, her band and team, and her Santa Cruz friends. With a village by her side, Stevens has grown and will keep growing, spreading her name through the music scene. 

“You cannot do anything without community. If you can, find community. It gets lonely, and you are so much stronger when you have people in your corner and who you can also pour back into,” Stevens said. “Learn from everybody.”

More from August Lee Stevens

• August Lee Stevens will be opening for musical artist Seal at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, CA on Sunday May 10. 

• You can listen to her most recent album, Live at the Troubadour, which is a compilation of Stevens’s originals and covers.

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Note from Author Rachel Raiyani

I met August Lee Stevens at the start of her music career in 2022. Inspired by her recorded performance of “Sweet Thing,” I messaged her on Instagram for advice as I was an aspiring musician. She could have ignored the message or replied with a few sentences of cursory encouragement. Instead, she put her number in the chat, and said, “Let’s call!”

She took a chance on me, and soon after, I was playing piano and singing background for some of her first gigs in the Bay. 

This is who Stevens is, always extending her hand to bring others up. Other than performing for a Warriors playoff game, opening for Smokey Robinson, and having her own residency at the SF Jazz Festival, nothing has changed. 

“We are all out here trying to do it. Everyone is so proud of the Bay, and so proud of it being recognized for arts and music,” Stevens said. “We are all helping and supporting and pulling each other along and opening doors for other people.”

It will always be an honor to have been a part of the August Lee Stevens band. 

Rachel Raiyani (John R. Lewis ’23) has written for UC Santa Cruz since 2023.

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