LONG BEACH, Wash. — The Adrift Hotel hosts live music most nights in Pickled Fish, it’s top-floor restaurant. Check out the bands performing this weekend and into next week.

Tom VandenAvond will perform at 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 27 and 28. Vandenavond is a contemporary ghost with a wisdom in his music that exceeds his years. His sound embodies the nature of solitary travel and the inevitable connections made from a life on the road. He has torn through his Midwest roots and created an auditory imprint of the highways and byways, truck stops and roadsides of the afforded white-line spectacles of the American construct.

If you listen to VandenAvond, you can hear a long haul on the Christopher Columbus transcontinental highway, where the DayGlo over-exposure of Los Angeles meets the desert of Palm Springs, the red rocks and mesa tops of Phoenix and Tucson, and the cumbersome nothingness of West Texas where a man can bide his time only with his thoughts and AM radio. Listen, and you’ll hear San Antonio and New Mexico heavy with Spanish and Native American charm, a brief pass through Houston and the descent into the thick air of southern Louisiana into the heart of Cajun Country. These are just a few of the back drops that bleed their influence into a catalog of work as eclectic as the land itself.

Following her performance at the Peninsula Arts Center on March 28 (see page 20), Ara Lee will perform at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 29 at the Adrift.

With an upbringing split between the hills of Appalachia and the heart of New York City, Lee’s dichotomous childhood made for a unique musical education. She cut her teeth fiddling and singing in the folk and gospel traditions of Tennessee, then lived a second life in New York as an R&B and blues soloist and studio vocalist and back-up singer. In her current incarnation as a singer-songwriter based in Portland, Lee’s powerful soul-infused vocals, combined with the simplicity of acoustic folk, create a style all her own — one that has been perhaps best described as soul-folk-tribal-funk-heathen-gospel butter.

My Darling Clementine will perform at 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, March 30 and 31. My Darling Clementine are husband-and-wife team Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish. Leading lights in the British country music scene, this duo has released two acclaimed albums, “How Do You Plead?” in 2011 and “The Reconciliation?” in 2013, garnering a growing legion of fans.

At first glance, the bygone sounds and imagery of the group might suggest something nostalgic, but scratch the retro surface of the record sleeves or the stage clothes, and you’ll find an act as pertinent and as compelling as any other 21st century proposition. And while looking to the future, there’s nothing wrong with nodding to the past. 

Inspired by the classic duets of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, King and Dalgleish’s blueprint was to make records that sound like they’re from the late 1960s or early 1970s and to embrace the whole countrypolitan look of that time.

My Darling Clementine offers country music for grown-ups, peppered with life lessons. The duo knows the genre can often be met with resistance in some quarters, with some people quick to dismiss it as a cliché ridden genre.

“Those clichés have only become clichés because they’re so good, they’re so true” says Dalgleish. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t address those clichés with intelligent lyrics. Country songs tend to be relatively short and often use very few chords, so it’s really important that the lyrics you use in the short time available carry some weight; you have to use your words cleverly. It’s an overlooked art, I think.”