“Come on, you’re coming with me,” says Illinois front man Chris Archibald, scooping up a small, wavy-haired child Saturday afternoon at WXPN’s Xponential Music Fest. It’s just minutes before the band’s 3:30 performance, and everyone’s getting settled into the grassy hillside.
“It’s a beautiful day, we have sunshine, we have beer, we have our lives!” exclaims Archibald a few minutes later to a growing crowd of eager festival-goers as he strums his banjo and lets loose a cavalcade of rambunctious, rollicking tunes.
“I know it’s hot and all, but can people stand up and move around a bit here?” asks the singer, clad in an oversized orange tee and knit headband. “I feel like we’re at a school assembly or something!”
The crowd gently chuckles—everyone’s in good spirits—and does as asked, small children, college students, and couples old enough to be their parents, all coming together to dance gleefully on the hillside…
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This same spirit of fun, music, and laidback good times (“positive jams”, as the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn would put it) permeates the festival—XPN’s 16th—in droves. Bands are carefully selected and varied—from Guster to Aimee Mann to They Might Be Giants—and in top performing shape. It’s a magical, family-friendly environment, and I’m happy to be a part of it!
The festival is spread out over the course of 3 days—Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. I decide to check out Saturday, and head over to Wiggins Park, on the Camden waterfront, around 1 p.m.
Walking into the festival is like walking into a fairground. There are food vendors everywhere, whipping up anything you might want—hot dogs! Fried shrimp! Hummus! Fajitas! —and beer that is surprisingly not too overpriced ($6 for a Flying Fish summer ale.) There are a variety of clothing and craft vendors, mostly peddling useful green products, and, most importantly, 2 stages, on which 40 different artists impress crowds.
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Illinois plays on the JerseyArts.com Marina stage, along with local favorites like East Hundred and far-away visitors like Nashville’s Katie Herzig, whose low-key folk is sweet and charming.
“This next song I actually heard on XPN earlier today while I was driving here—it’s so great to hear your music on the radio,” says Herzig exuberantly to the crowd, before launching into a toe-tapping rendition of “Hologram.”
Providence, RI’s the Low Anthem take the stage later and wow the crowd with their musical prowess (I count at least 10 different instruments, including organ, cell phone, and crotales—the bizarre, bell-like instrument made with small brass disks) and gorgeous melodies.
Local roots-rock legends Hoots & Hellmouth close out the night, offering up an upbeat, danceable set of country-meets-gospel-meets-tons-of-energy rock. What a day!
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Walking into the festival Saturday afternoon, I stumble upon the Marina stage first, and am impressed by the large crowd gathered. Yet this group soon seems insignificant as I find my way to the Camden County River stage—just a couple hundred feet away, on the other side of the hill—on which hundreds—nay, thousands! —are gathered, spread out on blankets and in beach chairs, enjoying picnic lunches and laid-back tunes.
Former XPN “Artist to Watch” and local gal Sharon Little kicks things off on Saturday—a feisty blonde with a large red hat and even larger voice—supplementing her throaty alto with a groovy brass section. Next up are Brooklyn’s Yeasayer, whose capricious indie-rock melodies are made even funkier thanks to lead singer Chris Keating’s twitch-y antics and lots of synths.
Classic rock revivalist Steve Wynn and the Miracle 3 take the stage next, invigorating the crowd with earnest, visceral anthems and then it’s the Bacon Brothers, the—yes, that’s right —rock outfit of one Kevin Bacon and brother Michael—who are everything you’d expect a Kevin Bacon-fronted band to be like, assuming you expect Bruce Springsteen covers and a rolling, alt-country number called “Too old for playboy.”
The evening brings about Pete Yorn, the shaggy-haired, Ray-Bans-clad indie-rock heartthrob whose poppy, intimate tunes like “Life on a chain” and “Closet” have the crowd screaming for more. The singer himself is full of smiles and quips—a natural charmer.
They Might Be Giants take the stage around 8, and their 45-minute set set has both children and adults clapping and dancing along. For their encore, the band plays a frenzied rendition of “Instanbul”—the fast-paced song that chides “Instanbul, Constantinople”— and guitarist John Flansburgh pulls 4 strings off his guitar in an ultimate act of rock n’roll bad ass-ery. Awesome!
The Hold Steady close out the show, walking on stage triumphantly to Pete Townshend's "Rough Boys." THS front man Craig Finn is one of my favorite performers possibly ever, and tonight he is on, bouncing around stage like a ball of energy, spitting into the mic, flapping his hands, and mouthing words to the audience who yell back and cheer enthusiastically.
“Wow, there’s a lot of you!” comments Finn, picking up his guitar, and strumming the opening notes to “Stuck between stations.” As the performance continues, the temperature drops and it starts to rain, but the band keeps on playing and the audience presses close together, determined not to let the weather get in the way of the music.
Finally, after 40 minutes, Finn puts his guitar down reluctantly, announcing, unfortunately, that they have to stop—there’s a wave of thunderstorms on the horizon, and XPN has deemed the situation unsafe.
The audience boos—everyone wants more rock! —but as an XPN representative reminds the crowd that there’s still a whole day of music left tomorrow, people nod and reluctantly head home—bodies covered in sweat and rain—to rest up for another exhilarating day.
