It’s summer music festival season, although in sweltering South Florida, you wouldn’t know it. Our big to-do, SunFest, already came and went with, to my ears anyway, little fanfare. We do have the hip-hop extravaganza Rolling Loud in July, but that’s it: Until III Points returns to Miami in October, the festival well is dry.
But what if I could pluck the best bands from the best summer festivals all across the United States and curate my own dream event? It would look something like this playlist.
To arrive at these acts, I limited my dream logic to only artists touring festivals this summer, and whittled the lineup down to 25 acts. Of course, were this a real festival—Thomason Fest, if you well—so many of these bands would playing against each other that I’d be racing furiously from stage to stage, leaving no time for food or hydration, and probably passing out from heat exhaust by 3 in the afternoon. But you get the idea.
The structure of this playlist is based on the classic music-festival inverted pyramid, starting with the headliners all the way down to the openers. Enjoy this peak inside my musical mind!
Green Day
Nine Inch Nails
Lauryn Hill
Norah Jones
The National
Wilco
Herbie Hancock
Sleater-Kinney
Spiritualized
Digable Planets
Mitski
The Breeders
Guided by Voices
Kamasi Washington
Courtney Barnett
Sunny Day Real Estate
Jawbox
Anais Mitchell
Femi Kuti
FEAR
Low
IDLES
Wet Leg
Dry Cleaning
Geese
See below for a full Spotify playlist of these songs.
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