At just 17 years of age, Senior Zoe Ferguson has already begun making a splash in the music industry. Her latest single, DIP, has amassed over 350,000 streams and last year, she was selected to the exclusive EMERGE program, a talent-search program from Atlantic Records. 

Ferguson started making music at the age of 13, drawing inspiration from her father who is also a musician. When she was 15, she started sharing her music, posting songs on Soundcloud and a music instagram account.  “I got some traction from [the account] and some producers in Portland asked me to work with them,” Ferguson said. “After that, I just started taking things more seriously and tried to get a bigger following in Portland.”

Following this initial success, it did not take long for Ferguson to attract the attention of industry-leading producers. Last year, Zoe applied for a teen-talent search program called EMERGE from Atlantic Records, a label whose artists include Cardi B, Bruno Mars and Lil Uzi Vert. Of the 7,000 applicants, Ferguson was one of 15 that Atlantic Records flew out to Los Angeles for a tryout in front of the label’s top producers. After making it through additional rounds of cuts, she was selected as one of the two artists to make music with producers who had worked with the likes of Khalid and Billie Eilish. 

More recently, Zoe has been working with Portland-area producer Graham Barton, who produced Ferguson’s highest streaming song to date, DIP.

The song, which has accumulated hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud and YouTube, received its start in Jesuit’s Clark Library.

“One day, I was writing my junior paper, in the library during class, and I had just gotten the track from Graham who was like, ‘Can you write to this?’, so I was listening to it in class and I was sick of doing my junior paper so I wrote it there in class,” Ferguson said. “Clare was across from me, helping me figure it out and that’s when I got the chorus done.”

“We were laughing about [the song lyrics] because she pulled them out of thin air,” Claire Kreutzer said. “She always knew what she wanted the concept of the song to be, so seeing all of the lyrics play out was really interesting to me.” 

The song was released this past July and received a boost in streams after it was added to a Spotify-curated playlist with over 750,000 followers called “Pop Right Now”. 

Following her senior year, Ferguson hopes to take a gap year and further pursue her dream of becoming a professional recording artist.

Senior Anna Kearney believes that Zoe has what it takes. “I think that in no time she will be a household name and singing music as a career, Kearney said.  “She is so happy when she is singing and really feels at home.”

Ferguson’s latest single, Medicine, dropped October 3rd.