Me at The Newport Folk Festival

Last weekend I went to the Newport Folk Festival. It was the most wonderful festival experience I have ever had. The line up was fantastic (Billy Bragg, Deer Tick, Iron & Wine, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Fleet Foxes, The Low Anthem…) and the location couldn’t have been more picturesque. For those of you who have never been the festival is held at Fort Adams Park an old
military fort from the Revolutionary war, the stages are set up on the lawns overlooking Newport harbor where people set up beach chairs and watch from the field or dock their boats and watch the show from the water. Its also an incredibly low key festival: there are only 3 stages and less than half the people you get at the other major festivals. Plus, they have real bathrooms
and they have vendors that sell lobster rolls!



Some highlights of the festival were seeing some of my former clients perform. Billy Bragg opened the festival on Saturday and was as awesome as ever. After his set I hung out with him and his crew a bit – Billy is such a delightful soul – one of my favorite songwriters and an all around great guy! After Billy I ran into the Avett Brothers (we worked their 2007 release ‘Emotionalism’) back stage as they jokingly did their pre-performance stretches. They put on an excellent show and the new stuff sounds fantastic but it was Mavis Staples who really brought down the house. Her performance was mesmerizing and as my boyfriend said “could not be topped.” The company we watched her with couldn’t be topped either, at one point we found ourselves sandwiched between George Wein and Rambling Jack Elliot.



After Mavis’s set we hung out backstage with the Ice Cream Man who was taping performances with some of the bands that played the festival. Check some of them out here:

We were just relaxing, eating ice cream and all of the sudden we saw a police escort arrive. We thought, who could it be? Bob Dylan? Obama? Nope! It was Gillian Welch and David Rawlings! Turns out the duo’s plane was delayed and landed less than an hour before they were set to hit the stage. They don’t usually travel like that but with the crazy traffic from the center of Newport it was the only way they could have arrived on time. We watched as they literally grabbed their guitars from the car and went straight to the stage and they still sounded amazing.

I haven’t uploaded my pictures yet but you can see some great shots from the festival on Ryan’s Smashing Life Blog here .