Sunday is the mellowest day of the weekend at Bonnaroo, but a good portion of the campers were having none of that tradition. The line to get a close as possible to Twenty One Pilots swelled into the thousands as gate opening time drew near. Still, being on the farm is easier on Sunday. Most of the EDM tweakers are either sleeping somewhere or packing up to leave, and the real world starts calling for those who couldn’t take Monday off, so there’s more room to move around. Twenty One Pilots even gave the crowd 20 extra minutes to make their way to the What Stage, but that probably wasn’t intentional.
The music schedule is generally tamer but no less packed with great options. The all-day acoustic/folk/bluegrass event at That Tent drew plenty of people who set up camp for the day, and they were thoroughly entertained. Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn offered their standard husband and wife chemistry, dobro maestro Jerry Douglas led his Earls of Leicester through a rollicking set of standards and not-so-standards, and Punch Brothers maintained their reputation as one of the strongest progressive acts in the genre’s history. Curator Ed Helms played a brief, joyous set with his own band, the Lonesome Trio, before welcoming innumerable guests from Punch Brothers to Jerry Douglas and Hurray for the Riff Raff.
While Spoon kept things super-cool on the What Stage, knocking a few songs off of their normal setlist to fit the time slot, Brandi Carlile graciously welcomed a delighted crowd to her sun-baked set on the Which Stage. Carlile certainly wasn’t shy about expressing her excitement at playing Bonnaroo, grinning ear to ear as she addressed the adoring fans. She kicked off a singalong with nearly every song, opening with “Firewatcher’s Daughter” and pouring every ounce of her energy into each subsequent tune. As the sun mercifully began to set, Florence + the Machine found the festival’s biggest field filled with people waiting for her ethereal stage presence and to witness the great new material from their most recent album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful. With dazzling production and performance, Florence wheeled her way around the stage, her powerful voice hitting the sweet spot in the gigantic sound system, and banged out one of the weekend’s most enchanting sets.
The sets of Robert Plant and Billy Joel weren’t scheduled to overlap, but after a set laced with Zeppelin songs “The Wanton Song”, “Black Dog”, “Going To California”, and “The Lemon Song”, the feverish cheers of “one more song” actually worked. Plant returned for a blistering version of “Rock and Roll”, and while he can’t hit the notes he used to, there’s no sense in undermining a great moment from a rock legend at Bonnaroo. Who, after all, can do it as a senior citizen like they did when they were young?
By the time Billy Joel took the stage, the venue was teeming with fans and those with nowhere else to be. As expected, reaction was muted for the deeper cuts (“All For Leyna”, “Sometimes A Fantasy”) but vigorous for the hits, of which there were many. “Big Shot”, “You May Be Right”, and the “Dixie” > “My Life” opener drew the loudest response. People slept everywhere; no matter what kind of stamina you have, four days in the heat takes a toll. Though he’s been varying his setlists lately, Joel didn’t do anything particularly inspiring from a music standpoint, running through his typical show with everything he could muster. But he did remark that he went to Woodstock. “I didn’t play it,” he said. “But this is what it must have looked like”. A pretty good crowd for a Sunday, indeed.
