Big Ears doesn’t need you; you need Big Ears. You might think “but wait, I already have ears and I don’t need them to be too big!!” but that is only because you don’t know I’m talking about the annual Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee which took place March 27th—30th for the 11th time since it was founded in 2009 by the Knoxville born and bred Ashley Capps, the founder of Nashville’s Bonnaroo. I have known the outstanding lineups since 2010, when Terry Riley was Artist in Residence and Bryce Dessner of The National was guest curator.
I have been attending music festivals for over two decades now. With each successive lineup announcement, Big Ears became my holy grail of music festivals until I found myself there last year and had the festival time of my life. I let my old friend and Spinning Platters correspondent Tiffany Black know about Big Ears this year and away to Knoxville we went, to cover a festival together for the first time since an ATP Festival in England twenty-one years prior!
Big Ears doesn’t need you as it now sells out. I returned for the second year in a row and I met many people who have been coming for six-seven years straight with their big growing ears to take in a festival with 14 stages —a handful of which are churches— and many impossible to navigate schedule conflicts between artists they may have seen or heard of, with many avant-garde and experimental acts that exist only to broaden and expand their horizons of what is possible when extremely inspired and talented humans come together to make and appreciate sound.
In 2025, there were many people I know performing and on the first day Thursday I went to see my buddy William Tyler record a podcast at the Knoxville Visitor Center with Essential Tremors and I found myself repeating what he said: “at Big Ears, there are a lot of tough decisions… but there are no wrong decisions.” I decided to prioritize artists I hadn’t seen before or couldn’t easily see in my home in NYC where many of the artists hail from and play regularly, and yet somehow I missed ambient elder and legend Steve Roach perform for hours in St. John’s Cathedral THREE DIFFERENT TIMES while intentionally skipping featured Jazz greats like Wadada Leo Smith and indie stalwarts Yo La Tengo, Tortoise and the 100 year old Marshall Allen and Sun Ra Arkestra who I have seen so much recently. Here is a recap of what happened in another mind-blowing year…
We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and got settled in the home of local mainstay Andrea Kukuly Uriarte, a Peruvian queer person who has lived in Knoxville for decades, has performed at Big Ears before and lives 10 minutes east of downtown Knoxville. Andrea told us they will perform with their psychedelic cumbia band Rica Chicha at The Pilot Light’s alternative free What For? Festival on Friday afternoon and I found out that legendary producer Joe Boyd , who Big Ears tapped to be the Artist in Residence curating films, would be recording a podcast for Essential Tremors on which he would speak about recording Nick Drake’s classic 1969 album Five Leaves Left, and we would listen to the 40 minute album start to finish in a room with him. Unfortunately, that meant we would miss a screening of the revelatory generative Brian Eno film Eno, but… no wrong decisions…
The 82 year old Boyd, who is currently on a book tour, began by saying he had no concept this album would be the most famous thing he ever produced when it was happening, and listening to Boyd talk about discovering Nick Drake and watching him close his eyes while listening was a “pinch me” moment. In the Q&A after, hearing someone discover Drake was not well-known in his lifetime was a quintessential Big Ears moment, of which there would be many.
Day One — Thursday, March 27th
In order to not be pulled in too many directions, I came up with a daily flow based on venue proximity, the pinnacle of which was seeing the female voice of Portishead Beth Gibbons open her rare solo tour toward the end of the first night. After William Tyler’s podcast, we walked around to give Tiffany a lay of downtown Knoxville, a charming small city in which all of the venues —some of which are early 20th-century architectural wonders— are within a 20-minute walk from one another. Then we went to the Regal Cinema on Gay Street to watch part of ‘The Napa State Tapes: The Cramps and the Mutants‘ , which had amazing archival footage of the SF Bay Area around a legendary punk concert at a psychiatric hospital on June 13, 1978. I hadn’t discovered the magic of the Lime renewable energy powered electric scooters yet so we left the film in time to walk to First Presbyterian Sanctuary to see the legendary musician and producer (Galaxie 500, Low, Ween, Butthole Surfers) Kramer perform a solo set, as I had met him in NY before and my friend Clara Joy’s debut album is coming out on his label Shimmy Disc at the end of May.
Last year, a large part of what made Big Ears so special was rolling around with my dear friend and co-producer of my music Shahzad Ismaily who was playing with many acts last year —indeed Marc Ribot announced while they were playing with Ceramic Dog the previous year that “Shahzad is playing with three other groups right now”— and Shahzad let me know he was only coming for Friday and Saturday this year. Yet shortly after I sat in the pews of the church, I saw him sitting in front of me only to then walk up to the grand piano and sit down next to Kramer and play with him. After a mesmerizing piano drone performance, I asked Shahzad if he was playing with Alan Sparhawk from the band Low at Jackson Terminal later that night, to which he gave the affirmative as he ran out to go and play his instruments of choice Moog Rogue and banjo on the first three songs with a “solo” Cass McCombs at the somewhat sterile yet immaculate sounding 1961-opened Civic Auditorium.
As Cass was later than initially scheduled, I had some time to kill so I wandered into the 1908 Bijou Theatre —where Dizzy Gillespie, The Marx Brothers and Houdini performed— to see the first of many acts I had never heard of: Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit , another mind-blowing performance of a work that was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in music. The operatic-trained Soper and her trio of instrumentalists were the first of many deeply moving sonic experiences, as her incredible work verbally deconstructed what art *is* as they presented it to us. “Art is imitation, and the different arts may differ in their medium of imitation” is the first line that I missed, but I was astounded into the present by Soper’s expression of her monumental talents and training, as my mind attempted to contrast her with the headliner Beth Gibbons, who’s work has been so important to me for 30 years… all artists are different. Ipsa Dixit was my initiation to take them all in as humans in their own right, beyond compare…
I rate Cass McCombs as one of the top five white male songwriters of our shared generation and had seen Cass play many times before —the first of which was at the ATP Festival in 2004— and his setlist was phenomenal, opening with his timeless “County Line” as Shahzad filled the crevices with his inimitable signature analog synth tones. I stayed a little longer than I expected, and I was delighted by indie bassist extraordinaire Brian Betancourt’s tasteful playing and harmonies over drum machine on Cass’s trademark new single “Priestess” , but I left in time to make it to the fantastic Tennessee Theatre and catch a few songs of Charles Lloyd’s Homage to Zakir Hussain the legendary table player who was supposed to play that night but died suddenly at a 73 years old only three months earlier. I wish I had the presence of mind to see him play in NYC two months before he passed. The tribute with Ganavya singing an ode to Saraswati, the Indian goddess of music and creativity with Bill Frisell on guitar, deeply moved me again. Though I had only seen him perform once, I could feel Zakirji’s presence in the room as those who played with and loved Hussain channeled him so effectively.
Big Ears is about sacrifices, so rather than sit for all of Beth Gibbons’ set, I elected to come late as I wanted to catch the end of Shahzad playing with Alan Sparhawk of Low, his first tour since the tragic death of his wife and bandmate of 30+ years Mimi Parker, in late 2022. I had seen Low three times before and they are one of my favorite live music experiences, so I figured out the scooter situation so I could zip up and down to catch the last 15 minutes of the set, which were some of the most powerful 15 minutes I spent during the whole festival. The last four songs, including a great cover of recently departed legend Roy Ayers’ “Liquid Love”, took us deeper down into the great heights of Low without Mimi. Their son and bassist Cyrus’ voice helped fuel the unimaginable way Sparhawk continues on thanks to the healing power of music. I went back to see them play a full set in NY less than a week later, and it was even more powerfully moving.
I was satisfied and happy and raced back and upon walking into the Civic Auditorium, I immediately “regretted” missing any of it as Gibbons’ band of seven other musicians created the perfect atmosphere for her iconic voice. I had decided the first time I would listen to her 2024 album Lives Outgrown —Gibbons’ first solo album in over 20 years— would be live, and for the third time in three hours, I was deeply moved. “Floating On A Moment”, the album’s only song I had heard, is as powerful as anything she’s ever done before. Multi-instrumentalist Howard Jacobs made the band otherworldly as he introduced us to a myriad of instruments like the gourd clarinet and of course Gibbons gave us one Portishead song “Roads” and softened it by stripping it of the piercing trip-hop beat replaced with brushes dragging on the snare… the tears come even as I write this. Gibbons is a real one, as she stayed with the crowd well after the show ended to take photos and sign albums, and she even signed “Love Beth XO” on my setlist! And of course, I went back to catch the full set in NYC on April Fool’s Day, with Cass opening!
As he was close by at the Sanctuary, I was able to catch “Dawn Birds” off pianist Phil Cook’s album Appalachia Borealis. Then I raced up to The Tennessee —the most amazing venue I have ever visited; I’ll take any excuse to see music there— to catch Bela Fleck playing banjo. I’m not into bluegrass at all —I lived in an old time music house for five years in the East Bay 25 years ago so I’m a snob and I always found his music with his band Flecktones kind of corny— but my host Andrea told me Bela Fleck is another thing, and indeed he is. Fleck was playing in a trio with a Antonio Sánchez, a drummer from Mexico City who has played with Pat Metheny and did the drum score for 2014’s great film Birdman, and Colombian harpist Edmar Castañeda, as they shared their new BEATrio album to be released on May 16th. “Whispers of Resilience” , the first song Castañeda wrote after badly breaking his hand a few years ago and worrying he would never be able to play the same way again, is the most powerful harp playing I have ever seen and it moved me again…
Completely satiated, I went to the Mill & Mine to meet Tiffany at Darkside, a band that made a great album a decade ago and blew me away at Primavera Sound in Barcelona in 2014. I could’ve seen Darkside the previous weekend as they played two nights in NYC and it was a great vibe and sound, but of course it was jam-packed as Yo La Tengo and Tortoise had played the previous two sets in the same room. I wanted to go to The Pilot Light as I had missed my buddy Sleepy Doug Shaw play What For? as he is on tour with Geologist (Brian Wietz) from Animal Collective who played set after Shaw that included songs from the pandemic album they released on Drag City called A Shaw Deal. Tiffany came along and we climbed over a stopped freight train, ran into Doug and Brian and also Joey who I had met at Big Ears last year and got to The Pilot Light in time to see Chicago’s Hide, who played truly fantastic industrial electronic music, the front woman shrieking over bruising beats with her breasts pulled tight with electrical tape… and in more Big Ears surprise magic I met Carolina who would be singing with Merce Lemon who was already on my list. Tiffany was way into The Pilot Light as I knew she would be, but I convinced her to return home to rest up in preparation for day two of four…
I woke up way too early with thoughts flooding back of the epic first day, so we paced ourselves in the morning and missed all sorts of acts I wanted to see. We caught a ride into town with Andrea who was going to play at 2:30 so we could catch The Nels Cline Singers at Mill & Mine. I’ve known Nels, the lead guitarist in Wilco, for the last two decades. Since the early 2000s when he lived in LA, Nels would come over to my East Bay house the morning after The Singers’ shows at the bar around the corner and we would eat breakfast and listen to Nels tell the best stories. Even though he lives and regularly plays in NYC, Nels is my Big Ears exception so I went to see him as much as I was able, especially The Singers who are so special to me and turned Nels my #1 guitar player decades ago, mostly due to his extremely experimental pedal usage that enhance his astounding fretboard skills. The Singers were enhanced by legendary percussionist Cyro Baptista, who played one of the best Big Ears sets I had seen the year before with his band Chama, and saxophonist Skerik who is fortunately fully recovered from his mysterious shoulder injury he had right after I saw him play with Cyro and Singers drummer Scott Amendola in Amendola vs. Blades a few years ago. With Trevor Dunn on bass, The Nels Cline Singers are completely chaotically electric, and they also played a beautiful tribute to Susan Alcorn, an experimental pedal steel player and Big Ears community legend who also died suddenly on January 31st at age 71. Nels is 65 and the way he plays, I hope he lives for a long, long, long time more… and 74-year-old Cyro started their last song dedicated to Caetano Veloso, who is 82! Viva Musica!
We then made it back to The Pilot Light to see Andrea’s band Chica Richa, and despite only playing with six people —sometimes they play with nine musicians— they were wonderful Latinx fun! Chica Richa plays the most upbeat cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” I’ve ever heard, with the genders lyrically reversed! We then became a group of four with Andrea and her partner Alejandra and we all ventured to the stunning Tennessee to see Meshell Ndegeocello play her 2024 album No More Water – The Gospel Of James Baldwin in honor of the Centennial of Baldwin’s birth. I know Meshell from our time living in Hudson, NY together and she is a next-level being, but I missed this show twice in NYC and so pulled Tiffany into the cult of Meshell, who sat the theater’s plush seats and proceeded to cry for an hour. I was not far behind, the band of Jake Sherman on keys and Abe Rounds on drums perfectly supported Meshell’s tasteful and humble bass rumble and grateful broadcasting of Baldwin’s deeply inspiring words with help from Justin Hicks on vocals, reminding us all of the essential importance of love and unity over and over…
I’ve been aware of England’s Alabaster DePlume for a good number of years and this would be my first time seeing him blow his unhinged free-flowing saxophone poetic musings and of course Shahzad was playing with him so it was a double win for me when we caught the end of his set at the Mill & Mine. I paced myself and gave myself a little time to walk around with Tiffany and show her some of the vintage stores in the town as I wound up seeing the great maudlin kitsch operatic NYC-based marvel Joseph Keckler stroll through the seats as he sang a song at the conference room-esque Regas Square. I then made it back to The Tennessee to see Jessica Pratt and I was once again moved, as well as shocked by her talent. I had known and listened to her music for over a decade without it really grabbing me, but to see her in person at age 37 and realize she was 25 when she wrote the timeless classic “Back, Baby” from 2014’s On Your Own Love Again was a true marvel. When she played the equally moving “This Time Around” from 2018’s Quiet Signs, I recognized that Pratt is way beyond the Nico or Joan Baez comparisons and knows how to write a damn moving song, and her band was perfect behind her. The whole theater was enraptured.
We then hopped on the scooters to make it to The Point, another church, to see Michael Hurley. Even though we had both seen him perform a few times before, I said to Tiffany, “Well… he’s not getting any younger.” I feel grateful that I did see him and wish I had stayed longer than hearing him sing the Leadbelly songs he used to love as a child and play my same-birthday-as-Snock-sister’s favorite song “Cherry Pie” —a cover of the Marvin & Johnny doo-wop song that was a hit in 1954 when he was 11— as sadly Hurley suddenly passed away on Tuesday April 1st. What a treasure! Michael was an outsider folk saint to so many and left behind over 30 albums and the internet was overflowing with even more tributes from everyone who instantly loved him. They keep pouring through social media from people who knew him, like my friend AC Sapphire , who I ran into a few days later as she was singing with another Big Ears performer…
But we left as I had to go back to Regas Square to see Kramer and my NY buddy Wendy Eisenberg and David Grubbs (Gastr del Sol) play together as Squanderers. Their album If A Body Meet A Body is great; the sound of three great players and listeners on an improvisational journey following and respecting each other and in that extended moment, I felt whole and complete. Kramer told me later that the album they released is a document of what they played in the morning, and there’s another album coming out with the music they played after lunch on the one day they met and recorded together, and this was the first time they’ve played since! I could only stay there so long though, as I pulled Tiffany to one of the best venues, an Irish pub called Boyd’s Jig & Reel, to see Merce Lemon. No regret again, as Lemon’s honey-sweet Americana rock songs with dirty guitar twang were the perfect gravel to play in as the sun set… and Merce even played a song about a friend getting a ride from Michael Hurley. And somehow, Merce knew my Hurley-loving sister, too!
At another great warehouse shack venue, The Standard, we poked our heads into Still House Plants for a minute but we couldn’t stick around as we both wanted to make it to see Friday’s headliner, ANOHNI, at the Civic Auditorium. I hadn’t had the good fortune to be in the same room with ANOHNI (then Antony) singing in 20 years; however I had been moved by her voice and songs over and over, almost too many times to count. Tiffany and I had both been introduced to her voice when Antony sang “Candy Says” at a Lou Reed concert in SF in 2003, so it was especially meaningful to both of us when ANOHNI’s encore was “I’m Set Free” by The Velvet Underground. I wished for more songs I knew but it was on me that I was standing outside talking to my buddies Will and Jeremy who I would see play with Joan As Policewoman on Sunday when ANOHNI played “You Are My Sister”, but Tiffany was deeply satisfied by “Drone Bomb Me” and “4 Degrees” from 2016’s Hopelessness. And the two opening numbers from 2023’s My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross “Scapegoat” and “Why Am I Alive” opened me up into the moving place where I was grateful to finally share the air with such a singular rare talent who identity is so expansive to include all of the people and natural world around her as she feels such unbearable pain as she beautifully laments it’s cruelty and destruction. As Joan, who played viola in an early version Antony’s band The Johnsons in the early 00’s, said as I saw her in the lobby as she left to catch something else: “so many feelings…”
Tiffany and I both remarked as we stopped to see Taj Mahal on the way to the “secret show” at Jig & Reel that ANOHNI’s deep worry was so different than Meshell’s deep gratitude which was steeped in moment-to-moment humility. I commented that ANOHNI started her career as a displaced gay cabaret singer in the Black Lips Collective of the early 90’s drag scenes of NYC’s legendary Pyramid Club and ANOHNI’s performance is still very much diva cabaret with a character that may have fully consumed itself, a la Morrissey from The Smiths, yet I am listening to her most recent album right now and realizing that unlike Morrissey, her voice is still so powerful and vital… And yet when we walked into see Taj Mahal —I had already seen a great Taj Mahal show in Hudson a decade ago and Tiffany had seen the legendary blues man so many times but Jeremy had just come come from there and said “you should definitely go for a few songs”— it was the perfect antidote for the appropriate heaviness the 54-year-old ANOHNI left on us. Such a joyful light energy at The Tennessee this 82-year-old black man channelled and invited us into his good fortune. Though he’s undoubtedly been through many hard times, Taj Mahal was pure happiness as he played the ukulele…
The secret show at Jig & Reel was not a surprise to me as Shahzad had tipped me off, but Tiffany had never encountered Lonnie Holley who I had seen once before opening for Animal Collective in 2018, so I knew what I was in for. It was clear we were in the right place as my buddy Laraaji walked in the same time us and sat down at the piano to join Shahzad, his friend Hope and Alabaster DePlume and his band in an epic improv jam that is par for the course with Lonnie, as he doesn’t write anything down as the music and the poetic words he sings endlessly flow out of him. It was non-stop ecstatic rhythmic joy of a real congregation with preacher Lonnie, who in his 75 years has been through unspeakable traumas —in the early 50’s he was the 7th of 27 children taken away from his mother by a burlesque dancer who took him on the road and he was traded at age 4 for a bottle of whiskey and lived in a whiskey shack and was called Tonky (his most recent album title)— and yet he has emerged as a beautiful soul who has been making art prolifically as a survival mechanism before he even knew what art was. Summoning “soothing sounds to take us from exterior levels to the interior levels of emotions”, Lonnie’s show was easily equal to the best performance I’ve ever seen in my life as it made me forget that any other music has ever existed. We were all perfectly present in love and appreciation with each other and life.
What to do after that?!? What else but hang around and drink and smoke at the best pub in America with everyone lucky enough to be there and then go across the street to The Pilot Light for the end of the second night of What For? to catch Vibrator, a local Knoxville band who would wash us clean with ambient noise healing sound… as we mixed and mingled and reveled with the many festival goers we can barely remember but will never forget, into the night…
Friday was so epic and I felt so complete that I slept for 10 hours and didn’t even care what I saw on Saturday —Tiffany and I were so relaxed in the timeless space of Andrea’s backyard a few days prior that we joked we shouldn’t even bother to go see any music and now we had reached that place *with* music— so obviously the first thing to do was to go to Pretentious Beer and see the Joyful Noise jam featuring Thor Harris (Shearwater, Swans, etc) and my #1 drummer Greg Saunier (Deerhoof) and friends that Kramer told me he would be playing. I texted Shahzad at noon a few hours before it’s 3:00pm start I asked him if he would be there, and he replied “yes” and then “maybe,” which I heard and then laughed. Lo and behold he was there and it was the perfect continuation of the jam the night before. Pretentious Beer has a backyard that reminds of Oakland house shows of the early ’00s and it got so packed that people were peaking over the picket fence behind the band, and it ended with Shahzad volunteering a skewed cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, with Hope soaring singing above as Greg played a drum set with random shoes on it as Wendy Eisenberg pulled wonderfully strange sounds from her guitar as Thor played a fiddle he made and a keyboard taped to a kid’s plastic basketball rim. Kramer kept the center with the truly beautifully effected volume-pedaled bass ukulele. If you want to hear what this truly one-of-a-kind meeting sounded like, look for the album on Joyful Noise later this year.
Rather than run off to something else, we hung around outside and talked to some other festival-goers from Chattanooga named Jake and Blake, who recognized Michael Hurley walking by and, with Jake’s encouragement, worked up the courage to talk to him. Blake said Hurley seemed kind of confused… but Hurley let him know he was playing a secret show in an hour at Jig & Reel, which was incredible serendipitous info as our host Andrea was so sad the day before for missing Hurley’s performance as seeing him 20 years prior was tremendously crucial for helping understand English words in music and build up the courage and strength to be herself as a performer. I let Andrea know and she was able to catch Hurley’s show and talk to him and even get a precious photo or two… and then I ran off through the light raindrops on a gear mission with Shahzad and Hope as I carried his Moog synth under a rainbow umbrella and instantly everywhere I walked I became an object to photograph in an “only at Big Ears” photo moment…
I then went to Mill & Mine to find Kramer for Michael Rother’s (Neu! / Harmonia) performance. For anyone else like me whose neurosis and anxiety might be completely relaxed by charging repetitive psychedelic grooves from Germany in the 70s —categorized loosely as Krautrock— it was a profoundly healing vibe. It was full circle for Kramer as he related to the group that finding a life-changing Neu! record in his local record shop as a teenager 50 years prior and now playing the same festival with Rother was a deeply gratifying moment. The group we were hanging with included Thor Harris, who I had never met and Thor told me that my text to Shahzad earlier was the cause of Shahzad joining the Joyful Noise jam. Thor is also a central member of Water Damage who would close out Saturday night and we connected over mutual friends and affinities as Thor’s unbridled smile exclaimed, “We are about to see the guy from Neu!”. Rother was ebullient at age 74, encouraging the nodding and bopping crowd to move their bodies and dance! Another iconic elder…
But I couldn’t stay too long as I wanted to catch a little of session harpist-du-jour Lara Somogyi, whose recorded music soothed me and has tracked with soundtrack score legend Hans Zimmer and played live with Anderson.Paak and Lauryn Hill. Ethereal harp in a church is sublimely beautiful, I was only bummed that I missed her playing with the silent string quartet by her side as I only had time to catch a single song… and then I scooted off to see a bassist I know from NY Brandon Lopez play with an esteemed “don’t miss” 62 year old brilliant elder writer professor and poet Fred Moten perform at the Museum of Art. But missed it, so I said hello and then ran into the first person to take my rainbow umbrella photo. We started to talk about Shahzad, whom she recognized and then she came with me to The Point to see Shahzad play with Peni Candra Rini, a vocalist with a PhD from Java, Indonesia who Kronos Quartet calls “one of the world’s greatest singers.” and they definitely won’t get any argument from me. Shahzad encouraged everyone at the Joyful Noise jam to make it point to check out her set and gave a wonderful explanatory intro before Rini led a five person group performing an Indonesian opera taking us through all of the emotions, with a shadow puppeteer/vocalist projecting on a screen behind her as her musical engine band leader created all the exotic and unique sounds we heard with different instruments activated by all of his limbs. Truly transportive and magical…
We then went off to The Tennessee to catch DakhaBrakha, a Ukrainian group of three singing and drumming women in traditional garb and one man on various instruments providing the melodic music. I had heard of them and figured, why not… While they were great, some combination of the passive inertia of the extremely white local crowd and the political pandering of the moment was a little too overly simple for me. I wanted more gritty familiar ambiguity, so I scooted back to Mill & Mine to meet Tiffany at Lankum, an Irish band of street punks playing traditional Irish folk songs that were deeply resonant for both Tiffany and me, as she has Irish blood. I travelled with her in Ireland 20 years ago and have had meaningful experiences in Ireland a handful of times since and I was right there with her, but I had to leave…
I love music and I thrive on the one of a kind groups of players improvising into the ecstatic unknown in rhythm and harmony, however I knew I was cursed as after my perfect day of music the night before that culminated in Lonnie Holley’s mind-blowing set, there was still one song by one artist about to perform I couldn’t get out of my head and I had to figure out how to hear it. I’m not in love with headliner Waxahatchee singer/songwriter Katie Crutchfield’s music —described by people I sat next to on the plane home as “pretty lady putting us to sleep”— she was playing solo and I had seen her with a band at a festival in 2019 and she didn’t take me then; however, her song “Right Back To It” from her 2024 album Tiger’s Blood is a *perfect* song. Many artists playing Big Ears are on tour, so I looked at her setlist and figured I had to be at the Civic Auditorium at 10:00 pm to hear her play it. Tiffany came with me, and we arrived on time to sit down and listen to her introduce it as a newer song from her most recent album. I felt the most sustained emotion all weekend and was on the verge of bursting into tears and sobs through the whole tune. The crowd cheered Crutchfield mid-song and her face couldn’t contain a smile of appreciation, her banjo player nailed MJ Lenderman’s harmony, and Tiffany agreed it was a perfect song and we were both complete for the moment, and then off we went…
We then saw an old New York downtown legend, Dougie Bowne, play at The Standard with Matt Nelson. Big Ears coaxed Bowne from a long performance pause to play a show supporting his 2024 experimental album The Stars Are Indispensable. Bowne has played drums for The Lounge Lizards, Lou Reed, John Cale, and Iggy Pop, amongst other notables, and it was a real treat to join the small IYKYK crowd entranced by the singular sounds of a musician with so much care and depth.
I wish we could’ve stayed longer watching Dougie. Still, I needed to scoot back to the Museum to see if I could catch one of the Andre 3000 flute whisperers, Carlos Niño’s Salon Night with Laraaji and Shahzad. Still, we missed it as it ended early —Laraaji is 82 after all— so we then went to The Bijou to see the trio of the best guitarists —Bill Frisell, Julian Lage and Nels Cline— play in Jenny Schienman’s All Species Parade, not to mention downtown NY legends Tony Scherr on bass and Kenny Wolleson on drums… I had seen them play with Big Ears headliner Laurie Anderson the previous year and Kenny is always around NY playing with my buddies. I remember Schienman coming to my house and playing fiddle with my housemate, Allegra, 25 years ago in California —and entering Shazhad’s Figure 8 studio in Brooklyn as I was exiting when I recorded my own music in 2019— and I was too curious. It took some time to get in as the line out the door snaked around the corner and my buddy afterward was underwhelmed as he described the sound as “if NPR was a person.” Ultimately, it was Jenny’s music and I enjoyed a fantastic band playing truly lovely music in a beautiful room with a few great solos by Lage, although they all unfortunately wiped out on a surf rock tune…
It was now past midnight and my eco-scooters shut down so I had to walk all the way back to The Standard to see a 14-piece version of Austin, Texas’ Water Damage featuring founding member Thor Harris and guests Kramer and Wendy Eisenberg which was the final show of the night. Though the venue was at capacity and the line was long and my media pass didn’t help me get in faster, the last 20-30 minutes were incredibly thrilling. The aptly-named Water Damage hit us with an intense ambient loud drone which pounded us with one loud riff over and over and over again. The entire song was like a crescendo of a darkly triumphant Godspeed You! Black Emperor movement.
Very satisfied, I then went to the Pilot Light to find Tiffany hanging with Alabaster DePlume and his crew as we closed out the delicious chaos of What For? Festival with local bands Glad I Didn’t Get My Stupid Wish, whom I’m pretty sure I saw and loved last year, and Day & Age, as Tiffany bonded with someone from Indianapolis who knew and loved a bunch of her old Oakland homies. She wanted to go follow the afterparty, and I wanted to go home, so I followed them as the Lyft took forever. We both made it home a few hours later. Andrea was elated from her Michael Hurley night and soothed and stunned us with her gyspy jazz guitar chops and I just *had* to learn Waxahatchee’s “Right Back To It” and sing it for Tiffany until we finally went to sleep as dawn knocked on our door… such amazing sounds enriched and enlivened us and Big Ears succeeded in helping us make memories with music…
I had been looking forward to the last day of Big Ears from a week before when I planned my day flows —not because I was exhausted and was happy to make it to the finish line— as not only was each venue was curated excellently, Sunday’s sounds were the perfect way to comedown into a life without such an amazing variety of great music right in front of us. We both got enough sleep as staying up late the night before didn’t tire us out, and we were energized by all the performers we were so fortunate to share spirits with in such intimate spaces in an incredible city. We weren’t hung up on catching Lonnie Holley at 1 pm as we had been blown away by Holley a few nights before, so we made it to town in time to catch The Tindersticks at The Tennessee a little after 2 pm.
The Tindersticks have been an English treasure for almost 35 years and Tiffany and I were lucky to see them at the ATP Festival in 2004. I’m normally loathe to compare musical acts to each other, however lead Tinderstick Stuart A. Staples is a honey smooth gritty combination who brings the listener into a magical different world, kind of like The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon without his necessary soaring bombast, Richard Hawley without a trace the elegant artifice that makes Hawley’s forlorn love comfortable and Nick Cave without descending to the intense depths of Cave’s inimitable sorrow. The Tindersticks are effortlessly charming and tasteful and nobody knows how to quite do exactly what they do and it’s even hard for me to put my finger on just how they do it. Staples seems to effortlessly appear on a tightrope as a troubled troubadour without a care, letting us know despite the tenuous and rocky road we are all on, we feel better and find balance if we just relax into their sound and we are all okay. Listen to their powerful 2004 single “Always A Stranger” that stunned the crowd to hear what I mean, and then listen to their 1997 single “Rented Rooms” to hear how little they’ve changed, as they arrived fully formed. I remember the feeling of seeing The Tindersticks 20 years ago and walking into this theater and sitting down, it was as if no time had passed, and I didn’t want to leave…
Yet we left a little early to scooter up to Jackson Terminal to see Mabe Fratti, whom I had seen three years ago in New York City, and I knew Tiffany would love. I also love Mabe and know her personally, as the horn player on my music found the Guatemalan-born cellist after playing with her Mexico City and introduced me to her and her work before she blew up —Erin, the woman sitting next to me on the plane home to NY and happened to acting in a play with my buddy Ira, was wearing her t-shirt— and the first time I saw her play, her voice and compositions hit me as perfect combination of the highly skilled yet deeply vulnerable intensity that brought so many people to love Bjork, Tori Amos and Kate Bush. Check out her single from 2019 that still brings me to tears. Fratti is highly versatile with so many releases and her music is merged with an experimental improvisational punk dirty hard edge when she performs live with her partner Héctor Tosta that appeals to anyone watching, including the hippest music influencers like Marqeaux who I talked to outside after I recognized her from her great videos asking artists she respects what they listen to, and of course she had interviewed Mabe…
I suddenly received a text from Shahzad that there was a Les Paul guitar at the Mill & Mine all the way at the north of downtown that he needed my help to get it to The Bijou all the way south, so I went on a mission and I’m so glad I did as it took me to see something amazing I would have never even thought to seek out, southern Italy’s Canzoniere Grecanico Valentino. As I waited for the helpful staff to track down the guitar, I was amazed and swept into the revel of the crowd at the end of their traditional Italian music with passionate vocals and lively percussion. They have nearly 20 albums and tour the world!
After their set ended, I made it down to The Bijou to ensure the guitar had made it there safely, and I was able to take in a few songs of Fieldwork, a “jazz power trio” of Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, and Tyshawn Sorey. I’m not a trad jazz enthusiast, though I can appreciate how the skilled players impress all the straight and narrow Knoxville people who tend to populate the crowd in the traditional beautiful old theaters, and I enjoyed seeing Sorey play drums as he was another heavily featured artist this year whom I hadn’t seen. I then left to make it to The Standard to meet Tiffany, who was really excited all weekend to see Joan As Policewoman. Despite having seen Joan play many, many times in the last 18 years, sharing a stage with her 26 years ago, and having the distinct honor of having her voice duet with me on two of my own songs I recorded in 2019, I was once again excited to see her too…
I was excited as my buddies, Will Graefe on guitar and Jeremy Gustin on drums, who are might be the best version of a backing band I have ever seen play with Joan. Joan always has fantastic bands; I have seen Joan with her long time drummer and my old buddy Parker Kindred on drums, Meshell Ndegeocello on bass and Meshell’s keyboard player the wonderful Julius Rodriguez a few years ago at Bar Lunatico, a tiny place in Brooklyn that always has great music and is a vestige of the old 90’s downtown Manhattan scene that was Joan’s scene. Her drummer Parker and I used to play in the same space in the late 90’s and that’s how I first knew of Joan’s wonderful songs and sought her out in 2007. Graefe and Gustin have been playing together for over a decade in their group Star Rover, which features Kenny Wolleson and Shahzad on their last two releases, and they astound without even a bass. Graefe’s solo guitar intro on “The Ride” —the first Joan song that grabbed me— had me wonderfully adrift in the unknown for minutes until he dropped the hook, and I was so grateful he was able to transport me into the feeling of loving that song as if it was the first time I had heard it. Their versions of two other songs I love “Tell Me” and “The Magic” also hit the spot in the best new way. Joan’s 2024 album Lemons, Limes and Orchids pulled me into her music for in a way I hadn’t been in ten years, when certain songs on 2014’s The Classic hypnotized me, and the whole album took me completely, just like 2011’s The Deep Field. The new album’s incredible rhythm section of Otto Hauser on drums and Meshell on bass set a deeply entrancing foundation as the band recorded live in the studio and her new live show emerges from that energy. Joan has an international audience and rarely plays anywhere in America outside of her home city of New York. The Knoxville Big Ears crowd gave her show one of the most rapturous responses of the festival.
After hanging out and having a cigarette with a young woman who used to live in NYC and was astoundingly moved by the scene Joan describes in the lyrics of “Lemons, Lime and Orchids” conjuring an actual night of her life, I scooted off and caught the very end of Brazilian jazz pioneer Amaro Freitas playing piano. Five minutes after I was entranced, it ended a little early and two other people who had caught the whole set were left deep in reverie and one scolded me for missing it lol. We only catch what we catch, and I guess I also missed Ravi’s daughter Anoushka Shankar playing sitar at The Tennessee, but I had seen so much great Indian classical music… what to do… and I had to rush to The Point to see Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet and bid goodbye to his amazing sound man Eli Crews, who mixed my own music. Nels continued to be amazing, but I had to leave after a few songs to rush back down to The Bijou to meet Tiffany and catch legendary Icelandic group múm, whose 2002 album Finally We Are No One had been such an important part of our lives when it was released.
On the way to see múm, I ran into Mabe and Héctor and gave them a hug and told them where I was headed but they were going to see Nels and I encouraged them to do so. As I made my way into múm and confirmed the Les Paul was on stage, I was completely transported back to the magical ethereal place the album took us as the century turned, with a blend of hushed electronics and folk melodies and mythical Icelandic tones. They were such a wonder, and I took a video of “Greener Grass Of Tunnel” —*the* song— and immediately texted it my old Bay Area friends as the sounds floated me up instantly and effortlessly into the ethers of nostalgia. Tiffany said it was the best set she experienced… and I have to decide right now if I want to go out tomorrow night and try to go see them play in at Knockdown Center in Ridgewood right after Mabe Fratti at another festival… and I want to! I’m listening to their album now, and I want to! It’s amazing when you hear a band play live that you’ve loved for so long but have never seen… I went again and I did not regret going…
After múm finished, I was able to make it to Jackson Terminal to see NYC soul singer Yaya Bey bounce and sing the heck out a couple of reggae songs to keep the vibe high as I made my way to the Mill & Mine for the final show of the festival: Austin, Texas’ Explosions In The Sky. To me, EITS was always a copycat instrumental post-rock band of the early 2000s bands I liked more at the time, namely Scotland’s Mogwai, Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Iceland’s Sigur Rós. Really though, they are all contemporaries, and despite liking a handful of local Bay Area post-rock bands more, EITS somehow stayed together. I started to respect them more when I saw them play for the first time in 2016 at the Basilica Soundscape in Hudson where I lived and worked as in the kitchen crew at the festival venue. I thought, “This is a really good band,” so I was looking forward to seeing them again, despite Tiffany not being as excited to see them. I found a place upstairs to sit and watch and take it all in as hardcore fans jumped and fist-pumped to the rising and falling brutal crescendos. I bounced downstairs a few times to the outside lounge where Tiffany liked to hang out and while they were playing, she agreed: Explosions In The Sky were the perfect ending for the festival: the instrumental elegiac sound to a decidedly mature Big Ears crowd of music enthusiasts bordering on fanaticism, reveling in the eternal youth music brings out of us all.
Going to Big Ears is a profound experience, a rare opportunity for a music lover to take a trip that is guaranteed to deeply replenish and inspire them. Knoxville is not just an incidental place, Andrea our host told me that Knoxville was originally supposed to be Nashville but the music moved 180 miles east due to tax reasons. Andrea told me proudly that she went to the same high school as The Everly Brothers, West High School, and the previous year I learned that Sam Morrison’s Bell Sales Music in Knoxville’s Market Square blasted Elvis Presley’s early Sun Records single “That’s All Right, Mama” on loudspeakers that caught the attention of RCA records producer Brad McEwen who brought two copies that led to RCA signing Elvis. Knoxville is fertile ground for helping people both make and discover music. My old friend Joseph, who came with me to Big Ears last year, had never been to a music festival before and he had such an incredible time and we connected deeper. As a result of our sacred music pilgrimage, Tiffany and I both had the experience of lightning striking twice. The similarities of our ATP experience were remarkable to both of us, and even a handful of the musicians were the same. Before the festival was over, Tiffany was already planning to return next year…
Big Ears is also an amazing reminder that it’s a community of people that come together to make music and also a growing community that appreciates the music. What makes live music so special is the human connection between artist and listener. Rare is the cherished environment where musicians work so hard to put so much out and the audience receives it and gives it straight back to them, but it’s guaranteed over and over again at Big Ears. I’ve discovered so many new artists I now have a personal connection to, and I have deepened my connection to so many others I already loved. Tiffany remarked to me on the phone “my cup is now full.”
I see social media posts about music people discovered at Big Ears, and I am still learning about so much of what I “missed” there, but the lesson is ultimately you can’t miss anything when you have your ears opening up to so much you’ve never heard. Two nights ago, I went to hear Joe Boyd speak about music on his book tour for And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain at a bookstore in Brooklyn and had my mind blown when he took me deeper into the Zulu origins of the The Tokens hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, a song I’ve sang at karaoke dozens of times but knew so little about. Boyd’s wife, Andrea, told me that they had six event obligations at this Big Ears, and they are planning on going back next year to simply take in all the music. After Boyd signed my book and copies of the first two Nick Drake albums for Tiffany’s daughter Shoshawna Scout, Andrea told me they would listen to my own music and Dave Deporis’ music I gave to Joe Boyd over breakfast, as is their daily routine. I am heartened and grateful that Ashley Capps has summoned so many musicians and music lovers to gather in his hometown, and the community continues to reverberate outside of Knoxville. This singular festival is a potent reminder that there is really no separation between artist and listener; we all have the Big Ears that we NEED to have to connect deeper to the music that never ends.
