Lucas Warford: Musician, board games enthusiast

How did your band Three for Silver start?

My good friend Willow and I started the band about 10 years ago. It’s primarily just been me and people who come and go. She’s come and gone, other people come and go. I write the songs, I sing, I play a lot of different instruments.

It’s sort of folky; We always have a hard time codifying it. The PR people always call it a combination of Tom Waits and Les Claypool or Primus … It’s like Americana–ish, it’s roots–ish, but it’s quite aggressive and loud and weird. 

How did you all find an audience in Europe?

We got picked up by a management company based out of Vienna in 2017. Their whole deal was bringing Northwestern musicians over to Central Europe — Austria and Germany, primarily.

They started booking some tours and trying it out, and things just started going really fine in an audience over there, and [got] a lot of traction. We’ve been doing one to two Europe tours a year since 2017, except for 2020, obviously. 

What is the Bellingham music scene like?

I think Bellingham is a very unique city. It has challenges, it has problems, but I do think it has an incredible richness of talented weirdos making art here, not just music, all sorts of things going on … It is going on all around you all the time. It’s most obvious in the summertime with, like, String Band Jamboree and Sh’Bang! are two incredible things that most towns don’t have.

You run a weekly board games night at 6 p.m. on Mondays at Nelson’s Market. How did that start?

Board games for me have been a passion pretty much my whole life … When I moved to town, I was always trying to find a place to do it in public. My buddy Mars became one of the co-owners of Nelson’s [Market] about a little more than two years ago. So that’s where it started with Nelson’s. He approached me. He was like, ‘Do you think this could be a good fit here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, hell yeah.’

We picked an off night, Monday nights, that are usually super dead for them. Even right off the bat, we started getting a pretty good turnout. Now we have between 10 and 20 people pretty much every week. 

What’s your favorite thing about Bellingham?

The reason why I moved here, honestly: that community of weirdos … There’s such an amazing community of hard working, passionate, talented performer, artist, freak, weirdo people … [it’s] such a great scene. I love all of them.