Newport Folk Festival 2018
Tags: Concerts, Live Music, Newport Folk Festival, Music

It’s been a while since I’ve written up any livemusic which is just terrible. I keep thinking I’ll find time to get back on it, because I really want to, but haven’t been able to find the time. But having just experience the transcendence of Newport Folk once again (my 9th Folkfest of the last 12), I’d like to capture some of what I experienced in words before it slips out the back of my memory into a haze of pure anticipation for the next one.

You see, Newport Folk is more than just a festival. It’s a community and a lifestyle and worldview. It’s special.

Think of the festival as a hug. There’s nothing quite like a hug. You hug your family and you hug your friends and you hug the love of your life; you hug as a greeting and when you say goodbye, when you want to provide comfort to someone who needs it and when you need comfort and hope to find it in someone’s embrace. Newport is like that. You open your arms up to it and it returns the gesture; you give yourself into it and it squeezes you tight… and vice versa. It’s warm and friendly and feels really good. And for all its history and legend, you can wrap your proverbial arms all the way around it and take it all in… if you want. And, speaking for myself, I want to take it all in and, year after year, do my best to squeeze all the love and positive energy out of it over the course of three days.

Also, the music is so freakin’ great. Like your favorite bands play better than you’ve seen them play before and bands you’d only heard in your earbuds surprise you when they play those songs you know live and bands you don’t really know become your new favorite bands. As overwhelming as the schedule seems on first glance, on paper doesn’t do justice to what you experience, especially when the buzzing bees of Newport Folk start to cross-pollinate and musicians start collaborating with others and the winds blow in artists you had no idea you were going to see. There’s nothing like it. As I tweeted over the weekend: I’ve livemusic’d every which way you can and then some, but nothing beats Newport. Not even close.

So, what did I see? Hard to capture it all, but I’ll do my best to give you an idea of what made it so special. My modus operandi at Newport is to see as much as possible, so I usually end up doing 15–30 minutes of almost everyone. This strategy allows me to see a lot of different artists, but sometimes means I miss that one highlight or sit-in or whatever, but what can you do?? In the end, I missed very little and almost everything I didn’t see happened on the Museum Stage which is indoors and small and usually involves waiting on line to get into… so you have to miss something else, which usually isn’t a compromise I’m willing to make. But did get into some Museum sets this year, thankfully…

Anyway, onto the recappin’…

Friday

To sum up the first day of the festival in one word, it would have to be rocking. Highlights included a ridiculous set from Margo Price. This was probably my 5th time seeing her (including at the Quad stage at Newport a couple years ago) and she always blows me away, but her Friday set at the Fort Stage (main stage at NFF) was one for the record books. The best performers know to bring their A game to Newport, especially when they’re playing the big stage and Margo didn’t disappoint. It felt like she played all her big almost-jamming numbers and killed every one. A duet with her husband on “All American Made” in which she changed the lyrics in a nod to the border situation and then a one-two punch of special guest sit-ins with John Prine and then a super-fun version of “9 to 5” with Brandi Carlile. Damn, that was a good set. Later on Sturgill Simpson, playing in the sleek-but-powerful quartet format of the last couple years, was much closer to a full-out rock-meltdown band than anything resembling the country croon of his past… although that voice of his still betrays his roots. Still, when the band breaks down into a Hendrix jam and it’s no surprise, you know he’s come a long way. Glorietta a sort of supergroup fronted by neddyo-favorite (and Newport favorite) Matthew Logan Vasquez was phenomenal.

Other Friday highlights included the high energy midday set from Fantastic Negrito, catching personal fave Erika Wennerstrom playing in duet in the intimate Museum Stage, the mesmerizing can’t-pull-away African vibes of Sidi Toure, the this-is-how-I-do-folk hypnotic lounge of St Vincent playing in duet with Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett, and getting to say “I told you she’s amazing!” to everyone after This is the Kit’s magical set at the Harbor Stage.

The day ended with more of that fist-pumping country-rock with a killer set from Jason Isbell. The end of his show featured a real big surprise when David Crosby came out and led the 400 Unit on awesome versions of “Wooden Ships” and “Ohio.”

Friday night

My brother ended up buying tickets to a night show for Friday night. Newport Folk Fest is really about the festival itself, which is an eat-til-you’re-stuffed buffet of some of the best damn music in the world, the concept of folk extended to include almost everything that’s good in the world. But there are night shows as well, a couple a night, including the famed Deer Tick run at Newport Blues Cafe. I’ve probably averaged about one night show each summer at Newport and they’re always pretty good, but nothing mindblowing. Thing is, after a full day at Fort Adams State Park in the hot sun, you’re pretty exhausted, especially when you bike there and back. A shower and a bite and a cocktail usually suffices for an evening activity. So, I can usually take-or-leave another show at night as well.

But we had tickets for this one, billed as Friends of Our Time Music hosted by The Cook Brothers at Jane Pickens Theater, which is basically a movie theater. This was going to be one of those lots-of-musicians kind of affairs that seem to be a relatively recent Newport Folk phenomenon. I was expecting a little more than an hour, each guest playing one song and that was that. Boy, was I wrong about that.

The show started with Phil Cook and his band playing 3 songs. I saw Cook recently at Rough Trade in Brooklyn (and I’ve seen him plenty in various bands previous) and it was a better-than-I-was-expecting show, for sure. Something about Cook’s goofy, lovable, heart-of-gold, progressive, I’m-a-huge-music-nerd persona is, well, really lovable. He’s also a great musician, has a great voice and a great sound. So, even if this show was just him and his band, it would have been great. But that was just the start of a ridiculous 2-and-a-half-hour-plus extravaganza that included extended (3–4 songs each) appearances by John Prine, Margo Price, Courtney Barnett. Lucius and Hiss Golden Messenger (whose band is basically the Phil Cook band), not to mention one-song’ers from a few others like Moses Sumney. It was like a mini-Folkfest with more collaborations and sit-ins and sweet covers and more. We had gone to a sort of similar thing with Shovels and Rope in the same theater two years ago and that was one song each and done in little more than an hour, so I was surprised when this one kept going and going. I was like “this will be done at 11” then “this will be done at 11:30” and then finally relented to the fact that it was going all the way to midnight. The last portion of the show was the bizarre surprise appearance of Mumford and Sons who played their own little mini-set complete with a cover of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.” I may not be capturing the crazy awesomeness of this show very well, but it was a riches of both quality and quantity, surprise after sweet, sweet surprise. So, yeah, damn glad we went to this!!

Saturday

If Friday was sort of the rock-out day, Saturday had more of a groovy feel to it. A big highlight was Curtis Harding on the Fort Stage early in the day, with a sunnytime funk-and-soul thing. Love his albums, especially the most recent, but never seen him live before and he did not disappoint in the least. Looking back over the list of artists I saw Saturday, I’m going to have a hard time whittling things down to “highlights” because everything was superb. Low Cut Connie was an explosion of early-day energy on the Quad. Probably illegal to have that much fun in a large crowd before noon, but damn, they were great as well. May as well just continue in order with Bedouine who did a lovely take on the thing you might actually expect to see at a Folk Festival — that is, singing lovely folk music with just an acoustic guitar. She did it well.

Hiss Golden Messenger (MC Taylor) is such a perfect fit for the festival and I got a heavy dose of him and his band/Phil Cook over the course of the 24 hours which started with the show @ Jane Pickens. He played a heavy part in the night show, then his own HGM set early Saturday afternoon (excellent) and then was a principal in a set billed as Beneath the Sacred Mountain. That was another set that I could write and write about. First of all, it was one of those conglomerations that felt like it was made especially for me. It was led by Eric D Johnson, of the Fruit Bats, who I’ve adored for a long, long time. With Johnson was bits of the Spacebomb House Band. Spacebomb is the label started by Matthew E White that I’ve also just been smitten with since first hearing his debut a few years back — in fact, I wore a Spacebomb t-shirt Saturday to share that love. How the hell those two got together peanutbutter-meets-chocolate style, I don’t know, but damn if just that fact alone didn’t put a smile on my face. Then they played this amazing set of covers with all sorts of guests (and did I mention Hiss Golden Messenger was also a big part of this?) (Bedouine, M.E. White, Watson Twins, James Mercer (of the Shins) (wow, that was a crazy where’d-he-come-from!?!), Laura Veirs…) and, holy crap, what a treat. A definite highlight of the weekend. Another awesome thing about the Folk Festival is that they sometimes have these pop-up mini-sets, most often in the Kids Tent, which you can get alerted to through the NFF app or Twitter (or the old fashioned “word of mouth”). So, it turned out that Hiss Golden Messenger (as MC Taylor and Phil Cook) played one of these kids tent sets which I ended up seeing. A totally different vibe with funny stories and a nice warm, intimate vibe.

Let’s see, what else was awesome Saturday? Daniel Norgren was my biggest surprise my-gawd-I-love-him-so-much of the weekend (although there were a few of them, as always). Norgren is from Sweden and plays in a trio that has a sort of hypnotic-rock-out thing going on. Hard to describe his sound, but it sucked me in in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Oftentimes I have a very acute case of FestivalADD where I have to keep moving, so when a set pulls me in like Norgren and his trio did, not letting me make my way to the next stage as planned, I know it’s something special. Long story short, I missed every bit of Tank and the Bangas (which I heard nothing but raves, raves, raves about) because I was so blown away by Norgren. Also awesome were: Shakey Graves (so great!), Jenny Lewis (so, so great! Love Jenny Lewis!), Colter Wall (so great! what an amazing made-to-sing-country-music country music voice… if you don’t know Colter, please get involved), Lukas Nelson (so, so great! powerhouse set!), and Courtney Barnett who always fucking kills it each and every time I’ve seen her and, no surprise, fucking killed it Saturday on the Fort Stage. I know you’re thinking “what about {artist I love}” — man, I can’t write about everyone, do you see how long this is already and I haven’t even gotten to Sunday yet!

The unannounced set which had generated some furious and somewhat crazed online speculation (that actually spilled out into in-real-life conversation on more than one occasion in the weeks leading up to the festival) ended up being (no surprise after Friday) Mumford & Sons. They were fine. It’s a rare thing that the Folk Fest headliners have moved my needle too much in the 9 times I’ve gone, I’m too consumed with new discoveries and mid-line-up treasures, so M&S were fine. In a running theme, Brandi Carlile came out and sang with them amongst many other guests (Jerry Douglas!?!?!). Carlile was the clear winner of the “Jim James Award” given to the artist who does the most sitting in over the course of the Newport Folk weekend, typically (but not necessarily) given in a year when Jim James is not at the festival, because if you’ve been there when he’s there, he’s all over the fucking place. Carlile was, indeed, all over the fucking place. Including kind of fucking up the lyrics to Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer with Mumford & Sons. If you’ve ever wanted to see an imperfect version of the Boxer sung by Mumford & Sons with Brandi Carlile, you may have missed your chance. Good times!

Sunday

So much amazing music and still one more day to go… sunday.. Sunday… SUNDAY! SUNDAY!!!

Sunday I went for it… a little bit of luck and a little bit of skill, I only missed two acts the whole day. So it went a little like Twain > War & Treaty > Preservation Hall Jazz Band > Kiki Cavazos in the Museum > Jen Cloher > Khruangbin > Passenger > Becca Mancari in the Museum > The Weather Station > Nels Cline > The Lone Bellow > Nicole Atkins > Jonny Fritz in the Museum > Toots & the Maytals > Charlie Parr > Gary Clark Jr > Charlie Parr (reprise) > Bermuda Triangle > Brandi Carlile > Langhorne Slim > Glen Hansard > Jon Batiste/Dap Kings Change is Gonna Come finale. Holy shit that is a killer day of music, my friends.

Highlights include… everything?? I mean, truly, everything was superb. War & Treaty is officially at keep-your-eye-on-’em status, a soulful, groovy, perfect way to start a Sunday. Pres Hall was fantastic, when are they not? Really enjoyed Cavazos doing the solo-with-acoustic-guitar-thing. Jen Cloher is on Courtney Barnett’s label and features Barnett as lead guitarist and, wow, she rocked! If you know me, you know I’m a founding member of the Khruangbin Appreciation Society (also known as the LoveLee’s), so yeah, their playing Newport, even in a sort of mellow-sunshine-afternoon mode, put a huge grin on my face… {catches breath} The Weather Station was so great, a sort of Joni Mitchell voice with a perfectly jazz-inflected folk band to back her… love me some Jonny Fritz, glad I got to see a little bit of his set. Nicole Atkins has such a can’t-help-to-love-her stage presence and her voice and her songs… loved her since first seeing her many years ago and so glad to see her kill it at Newport. And Langhorne Slim and Glen Hansard and Toots and Brandi Carlile and Gary Clark Jr all sounded great or better. Loved everything I heard from all of them.

A couple stand-outs worth their own sentence or two were, first and foremost, Nels Cline. His set was billed as a resonator guitar thing and he did a great job playing in duet with Brandon Seabrook, bordering between technical wow! shit and sheer thing-of-beauty playing and, this being Nels Cline, some weirdo out-there stuff. Altogether, it was a mesmerizing set of mostly instrumental music, although we did get some Nels vocals. Would’ve been one of my favorites of the weekend on its own, but then he brought out Warren Haynes (lots of great surprises this weekend, that was a big one) and pushed things over the top. Love the fact that there’s room for a set like this at Newport and that it works and that it happens on the same stage immediately after Khruangbin. The booking at Newport is so damn good and continues to get better and better and seems to be bending strongly toward my eclectic tastes.

The other set deserving a separate paragraph was Charlie Parr. I’d heard Parr’s stuff on album before and very much dig it. Just recently we were riding in a car with a friend and his stand-out track “Dog” came on and my friend was talking about how much he loved the album and we very, very nearly got into an accident at that moment and so it very easily could have been the case that the last thing I heard could very well have been Charlie Parr and I think I would have been OK with it. Even so, seeing him play live, just him and his guitar accompanied by another dude playing washboard (and often hitting the washboard like a piece of percussion), was a serious revelation. A raw kind of ramshackle slide guitar playing and highly entertaining songs with an aw-shucks humor in between… I loved this set so, so much. Walked away to catch a little Gary Clark Jr and had to return for more.

Finally was the finale. Billed as “A Change Is Gonna Come” it was led by Jon Batiste with the Dap Kings as the backing band and, again, featured a rotation of guests on different covers. Words cannot do justice to how good this was. Guests included Leon Bridges, Gary Clark Jr. Valerie June, Rachael Price, Maggie Rogers, Brandi Carlile (duh!), playing a bunch of inspiration and political favorites. Probably could write lots and lots about this set on its own, but a few things to note…

Chris Thile! It shouldn’t have been a huge surprise that he would play at Newport, but, I was still surprised when he came out. But the real take-your-breath-away moment was the duet he played with Batiste on “My Oh My.” Like, holyfuckingshit, this was a thing of absolute beauty. The entire festival in the rear view mirror, a weekend in which everyone had inhabited this alternate universe where all the ills of our world seemed to be held at bay by the bubble of love and positive energy at the Fort. The two of them just transported, creating something transcendent on top of the already-transcendent. A true wow! moment in a weekend full of them.

Later Mavis Staples came out. Again, not a huge surprise, but what a wonderful thing it is every time she comes out and performs at Newport. The festival always feels relevant and now, but the history is always there and no living performer represents that history better than Mavis. She led the band through Jesus on the Mainline and then the festival-ending Freedom Highway. The big finale seemed to have everyone on stage and felt like it could have gone on forever and that everyone still standing would have kept dancing as long as they kept playing. No better feeling.

Finally, there was one kind of thread through the weekend that really represents how awesome this festival is, though, and maybe a reason to be optimistic about the world. In the run-up to the festival with the “unannounced” billed for Saturday night’s headline set, one of the speculations was that Neil Young would play. Obviously that wasn’t the case, for better or worse, but instead his song “Ohio” was played three times, by three different groups in three different ways, perhaps symbolic ways. Friday the headliner was Jason Isbell who brought out David Crosby. These two middle-aged/elder white dudes played a rather straightforward (and awesome!!) cover of “Ohio.” This morning I made it into the Museum Stage for Becca Mancari who played with another young woman on guitar. They are in Bermuda Triangle with Brittany Howard. From her bio: “Born in Staten Island, New York, to an Italian-Irish preacher and a Puerto Rican mother, Mancari has lived a life of transition — from working as a janitor in South Florida, to writing songs with train hoppers in the Blue Ridge Mountains…” These two young women also played “Ohio” and it was raw and loud and angry, especially for just a duo in a small room. Totally killer. Finally, during the final set of the festival, led by Jon Baptiste & the Dap Kings, “Ohio” was played again. This time Baptiste was joined by Gary Clark Jr + Leon Bridges and it was slow & mellow & soulful & beautiful. Same song, three groups, three different viewpoints, all praiseworthy, a wonderful in their own ways. Thanks Neil!

Thanks Newport! Keep on keeping on! See you next year!!