A Questlove Supreme

Our Travel Portland campaigns continue to pull in more visitors year after year, but four years in, it was time for fresh ways to tell fresh stories. In a city long known for music—from indie artists made unforgettable like Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney to long lost legendary venues people still talk about like La Luna and Doug Fir—Portland keeps the volume knob turned to 11. We heard he loves the place, so to prove our breakbeat bonafides, we invited Questlove to come visit. That’s right, our challenge was to impress the drummer of the Roots, the dude dropping rim shots for Jimmy Fallon while churning out music documentaries and DJing SNL afterparties. Did we mention he owns more than 200,000 records? Portland needed to come correct.

In short, show Questlove a good time and document the day. Authenticity begets awesomeness, simple. We know our record stores are some of the best and most surprising in the world, so we took him to a few favorites, Jump Jump and Records by Mail, before swinging by the state-of-the-art vinyl listening venue Mono Space and ending the day with high-class cuisine at Nodoguru. All in, the stoke was high for Questlove and for those following along: our short documentary of the day took off and we were able to connect Portland and Travel Portland with a new audience in a new way.