The biggest challenge that’s faced Newport Folk Festival in recent years is the burden of extraordinary expectations that it’s constantly meeting and that’s never been truer than this year, after Executive Director Jay Sweet and his team brought the 2022 event to a close with a surprise performance by Joni Mitchell that was her first full set in close to two decades.
In the sixty-plus years since its inception, the Newport Folk Festival has taken on a plethora of forms, from its original 1959 home in Freebody Park where Dylan went electric in 1965, to Fort Adams State Park where the Pixies went acoustic in 2004. And of course, there was also the for-profit era that brought us the “Dunkin Donuts Newport Folk Festival.”
The current era of the event began in 2008 when founder George Wein hired Jay Sweet to take a shot at the lineup. Sweet included The Black Crowes, a solo acoustic set from Phish frontman Trey Anastasio and the first-ever performance at the event by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, who would go on to work with Sweet on the event for years to come.
2011 saw the launch of the Newport Folk Foundation and a return to non-profit status, and ever since, Sweet and his team have carefully curated a three-day event each summer at Fort Adams that shares the honor of being one of the only festivals besides Coachella to sell out its entire ticket inventory without naming a single artist who will be performing. The festival’s repeat offenders have an inherent trust in Sweet and his vision that affords him the kind of carte blanche other promoters can only dream of.
That flexibility has returned bountiful dividends in the form of rare one-off collaborations, surprise performances from certifiable icons, and truly magical musical moments that can only exist in a space that encourages risk-taking on the part of the artist and offers a supportive, open-minded audience as a safety net.
In 2019 Dolly Parton showed up out of the blue to perform with Sheryl Crow and Brandi Carlile. James Taylor sailed directly to the fort to finish performing a set that got rained out decades prior and Joni Mitchell returned to the stage in 2022 for the first time in a generation. In 2016 My Morning Jacket served as the unannounced backup band for Roger Waters, and now these are the kind of surprises that Newport Folk attendees have come to expect.
For the most part, the 2023 incarnation of the event (July 28-30), didn’t have the kind of explosive headlines previous events have generated, but that might be the best outcome the festival could have hoped for. James Taylor subbing in for an exhausted Noah Kahan was without question a historic moment in the event’s storied history but otherwise, unlike previous years, the lineup as it was presented the night before the gates opened was what the audience got.
My Morning Jacket headlined the first of three nights with a performance that started with the lengthy “Steam Engine,” which might as well have been the band’s way of saying, “We’re going to try something different tonight.” There are few artists, if any, who “get” what Newport Folk is about more than James and you’d be hard-pressed to think of a musician more closely associated with the event. Not only did he tap into his inner weirdo and bring out Animal of The Muppets to play drums on “One Big Holiday,” but both Margo Price and Maggie Rogers joined Jacket during their set for performances of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Say You Love Me.”
On the June 7th edition of The What Podcast, James lamented that Bonnaroo has “locked down a lot” since it changed ownership, making collaborations harder, calling it, “a real bummer.” James went on to say that what he misses about Bonnaroo from the early days is what Newport Folk still provides for performers. Both “I’m Amazed” and “One Big Holiday,” are bangers, but for the most part, their headlining set did its best to stray from their normal territory and give in to their environment by playing a handful of numbers from the folksier end of their catalog like “Hopefully” off 2001’s At Dawn and “Circuital” off the 2011 album of the same name.
The following afternoon The Hold Steady put on one of the stronger performances of the weekend with a set that stretched into every corner of their discography but placed heavy emphasis on material from 2006’s Boys and Girls in America, a 21st-century tour de force in folk-rock storytelling that manages to take tales of kids in the suburbs getting wasted before all ages concerts and fooling around in the back seat of vintage muscle cars and makes it all come across as high poetry. One of the best examples of this was the second song of their set, “Party Pit” which has a tried and true refrain of, “We’re gonna walk around and drink some more.” Or a second-half performance of “Stuck Between Stations” that starts out with a verse that gave the album its title, which is itself an homage to the Beatnik road trip classic, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.
Frontman Craig Finn, who performed the day prior during a Harbor Stage performance by Slaughter Beach, Dog, has a spastic persona on-stage that gives the audience a feeling like he’s trying his damnedest to stay in control of himself but is hanging on by a thread. Whenever an event with a genre in its name like Newport Folk Festival or New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival comes about, there are always the predictable complaints about which of the artists slating to perform don’t meet the criteria of said genre. The flaw in this logic is that genres are always changing and events like Newport Folk have a responsibility to change with them. In 2023 there are few performers or songwriters better equipped to demonstrate to an audience of folkies how far storytelling by song has come since George Wein and Pete Seeger founded the festival.
Another artist who championed changing a traditional genre was Billy Strings. The guitarist born William Lee Apostol was the headliner on Sunday and closed the festival out without the aid of guest artists or Muppets. Strings has skyrocketed to stardom in just a few short years and when you watch him perform, it isn’t hard to understand why. Seeing phenomenal guitarists up close often provides a unique opportunity to better understand what kind of cool techniques they wield to achieve their signature tone, but with Billy Strings, there are no such insights. What impresses isn’t his tone but his technical proficiency and his ability to speed around the fretboard faster than the likes of John Mayer, Metallica’s Kirk Hammet or Carlos Santana. He almost makes you wonder if the nickname “Slowhand” should still belong to Eric Clapton.
What makes Strings such a Phenom isn’t just his mastery of the instrument, but the way he carefully blends the heavily traditional elements of the bluegrass genre with the kinds of modern sounds Doc Watson never envisioned. Strings’ set was made up of a cross between his own material as well as a handful of Old Time classics, and Strings, with his bandmates on banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and bass, kept their playing on the traditional side of things when it came to the structured versus and choruses of their songs, but when they started to improvise, that’s when we saw them stretch their legs and stray into the 21st century with the aid of a series of effects pedals that shift octave, modulate pitch, provide gain and analog phase to a guitar tone driven by a strictly acoustic instrument that’s been modified to include a guitar pickup to turn the vibration of his strings into an electronic signal ready for manipulation. The subtle-yet-genius aspect of his performance is String’ ability to seamlessly weave between those traditional and modern approaches to these compositions in a way an untrained ear will barely notice.
Prior to Billy Strings, Lana Del Ray performed one of the most hotly anticipated sets of the weekend on the Fort Stage before an overflow audience that drew more boats and kayakers to the edge of the festival border than any in recent memory. So many teens made their way to the fort by sea to watch from across the fence that law enforcement dispatched officers to the perimeter to prevent kids from jumping over, something a few young women managed to do successfully.
Del Ray’s bona fides as a diva are bountiful and that she was the only artist in recent memory to forbid photo pit access to photographers was far from surprising. The crooner-born Elizabeth Grant has established herself as one of the most influential voices of her generation in great part due to an aloof image of vintage wealth, which intentional or not, she powerfully reinforced by announcing from the stage that generations of her family were buried nearby in the resort town which arguably defines the Gilded Age. Although she sang out of key on more than a few occasions in a way that was only more obvious when compared to the powerful performances of her backup vocalists, she made the most out of her first appearance at the festival, welcoming super-producer Jack Antonoff to the stage while she serenaded him from her seat atop the Steinway & Sons piano he was playing on. She noted that playing Newport Folk Festival had been her dream since she was 14 years old, which was a sentiment attendees heard repeatedly throughout the weekend in one way or another.
After the 2022 event came to an end with The Joni Jam, anyone being honest would tell you that by the end of the weekend, it was a bit disappointing that the only headline-grabbing surprise [James Taylor] came to be after a scheduled artist backed out. It’s hard to say exactly what folks’ expectations were going into the 2023 event but whatever they were, they weren’t realistic. Jay Sweet and his team have turned Newport Folk Festival into a mythical event where magic happens, laws of thermodynamics seem not to exist and Baby Boomer Folk Icons are conjured from the sea itself.
Even without a plethora of surprise icons, Newport Folk was a magical weekend of inspired performances by an eclectic array of artists who told their stories with bravery and melody in a way that’s entirely their own. The weather was mostly perfect short of Saturday’s final performance coming to a close slightly before schedule and the event gets high marks for the way it uses the app and the big screens to communicate important information directly to the audience. By yet again selling out every ticket the day they went on sale, it was ensured before the festival started that it would be profitable and the quality of the performances this time around ensures that demand will be just as high next year.
Jay Sweet and all the good folks behind Newport Folk Festival have freed themselves from this cycle of annually one-upping themselves. Maybe now’s the time to speculate as to what they’ll accomplish with that freedom!
Photos by Andrew Bruss
