You Should Absolutely Be Going to Big Ears, Too

In almost 20 years of not loving music festivals, I’ve missed exactly one Big Ears. It is better now than it has ever been.

Welcome to the 17th edition of Out & Back, my new newsletter about music and whatever else. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I’d be honored if you did. Before we dive into this week’s dispatch from the Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tenn., here are two pieces that ran last week, while I was down south: a “Best New Music” Pitchfork review of Neurosis’ mighty reunion album, An Undying Love for a Burning World, and a Bandcamp Daily profile of Taper’s Choice, an excellent jam band consisting of members of big-time indie rock acts. OK, to Big Ears we go.

As 2008 came to an end, I had only one concert-going wish: I wanted to see Christian Fennesz play the guitar.

The Austrian electroacoustic producer had just released Black Sea, his first album in four years but his best since 2001’s groundbreaking Endless Summer, and I was obsessed. As I headed for his website in those simpler times of online curiosity, I steeled myself for an expensive trip to New York or maybe even Europe. His shows were rare, as I understood it, and I had little reason to believe he’d be visiting the American South, let alone North Carolina, anytime soon. I gasped, then, when he had a single North American date listed—something called “Big Ears,” a new festival ostensibly scheduled for Knoxville, Tenn., three months later, in February 2009. The enterprise was so inchoate that I couldn’t find a website, but I emailed an editor at Pitchfork that night to ask if I might review it, anyway.

Their “yes” changed my life: That inaugural Big Ears—scattered across a clutch of theaters and strange little rooms in a sliver of the then-sleepy city—was a continual revelation for 25-year-old me, instantly expanding my sense of what was possible. The Necks’ first North American show remains one of the best hours of live music I’ve ever encountered, upending my idea of how great bands operated. I watched Nicolas Collins fiddle with electronics I could only begin to comprehend in what felt like an abandoned classroom. I saw Philip Glass walking down the street and realized, maybe for the first time, that even supposed gods I’d read about in books were just people, too. Big Ears became a lodestar for me and my friend, Greg, when we started a festival called Hopscotch across state lines a year later. In February 2009, Big Ears widened my perceptions of the world. In these early days of April 2026, I am thrilled to say it still does.¹

Mary Lattimore and Dave Harrington in an improvisational duet at Big Ears 2026.

With one exception, I have made an annual pilgrimage to Knoxville every spring for Big Ears, every time they’ve hosted it, whether I was living in North Carolina or Colorado or a van winding through the American Southwest. These visits have provided some of the best sets I’ve ever seen: Diamanda Galás making an enormous theater feel small, a sorcerer’s trick; Bang on a Can turning Music for Airports into a blissful sermon; Lonnie Holley transforming a tiny Scottish bar into a museum of emotional history; John Zorn wielding Cobra like a weapon of love; Jason Moran and Milford Graves in a duo set that felt like a tender embrace. I have cried to Julie Byrne and been starstruck over Jaimie Branch and transfixed by Kali Malone and amused by Andrew W.K. and inspired by Shahzad Ismaily. I could continue down this lane of astounding memories until you ran out of patience for this paragraph, so it’s much more efficient just to say it this way: Even when Duke inevitably drops its March Madness game, I leave Knoxville at the end of every March fulfilled to the point of overflowing.

That’s certainly how I feel right now. I’ve thought a lot in the last few days about how to write about this year’s Big Ears, how more than ever this one felt like an infinite set of miniature festivals beneath one vast umbrella, how it felt like a choose-your-own-adventure escapade in the style of a thru-hike. I think the most honest way is to string together a few acts for assorted reasons.

The best thing I saw, for instance, was Charlemagne Palestine, the minimal maximalist sliding wooden dowels beneath the keys of a massive pipe organ so as to make the whole thing come alive like howling wind. It was one of the most beautifully loud experiences of my life, Palestine’s little melodies dancing above the drone as his menagerie of teddy bears looked on.

The next day in the same space, the songwriter Annahstasia played guitar alongside a friend with nylon strings, but her voice commanded the Episcopal cathedral by itself. She would lift from her husky contralto into a fluttering soprano, then down again, the entire room on that roller-coaster alongside her.

Annahstasia (right) with guitarist Mia Garcia at Big Ears 2026.

And on Thursday night, I watched the first iteration of Taper’s Choice play a high-wire final show. The next afternoon, the departing member, guitarist Dave Harrington, performed an improvisational duet with harpist Mary Lattimore, as delicate and intuitive and risky as music gets. That was in an abandoned bus station that SML commandeered every night for two sets in the round; they were all sweaty slippy-slides between bedlam and groove, mesmerizing and charged. And on Sunday afternoon, that same space was full of Lou Reed’s guitars, all locked in slowly fluctuating roars. I sat on the floor and listened for a long time, the ruthless hum feeling a little like a Sunday afternoon blessing.

Or there was the way Tyshawn Sorey reconsidered the rhythmic divisions of heavy metal as he improvised in a duo with his old friend Ryan Clackner, a former jazz guy who is now a prolific black metal country outlaw of sorts in Knoxville. It felt like watching two people riding lightning for real. The next day in the same room, Sorey laid back as the 85-year-old Roscoe Mitchell looked for the path he wanted to pursue for the next hour. It felt like watching water search for the best grade to take back to the sea. Zorn made the end of Cobra sound like fireworks in the Bijou Theatre, the space where The Necks altered everything for me so long ago, after Wild Up made an exquisite marathon of Julius Eastman’s pointillist masterwork Femenine in the same room. As members of Wild Up surrounded the audience with sleigh bells, the line between outdoors and indoors seemed to blur, with the percussive rattle mirroring summer cicadas. It made me think about being back on the Appalachian Trail, a hundred miles or so to the east.

Once again, I think I should stop there, for fear of tedium or seeming hyperbolic. Sure, I could go on like this, whether it was telling you about how absolutely engrossing the supergroup Medeski Martin Metzger & Cline were or how great Alan Sparhawk’s new tunes with Trampled by Turtles sounded, how that collaboration seems to be evolving still. I could tell you about how Yasmin Williams and William Tyler reinvented their own tunes in a collaboration that does not yet have a name (I have suggested, simply, “Williams”) or how Eliana Glass, singing in the corner of a church with only a piano, was one of the most quietly moving experiences I’ve had in a second or how an improvised set in a glass-blowing studio as the furnaces roared mirrored the delirium that always begins to set in three days into such an extravaganza. Oh, hell, I guess I just did tell you. Big Ears is a playground, morphing every year as it grows.

Patrick Shiroishi, Dave Harrington, and Max Jaffe, improvising in a glass-blowing workshop at Big Ears 2026. Shahzad Ismaily would show up minutes later, eating pizza as he played.

A few sentences stick with me from a 2006 piece in The Village Voice by Tom Breihan, a towering columnist at the paper in those bygone days. He was writing about the first real Pitchfork Music Festival, at Chicago’s Union Park. I was very new to Pitchfork and very new to music writing beyond my college paper back then, so I hung on every word Tom wrote. “I didn’t drop $250 on plane tickets so I could go see bands that I’ve mostly already seen,” Tom began his piece. “I went out to Chicago for the Pitchfork Festival for the same reasons I went to Pitchfork’s Intonation fest last year: I wanted to drink free beers and hang out with my friends and generally take advantage of the VIP-treatment shit that allows me to walk around like I’m actually somebody for one weekend a year.”

This is, of course, a sufficient reason to go mostly anywhere—to see your friends and feel good about yourself. But Tom’s words from long ago give away the game of music festivals for me, why I typically avoid them if at all possible, although I used to run one myself: They often have more to do with the experience of socializing, of seeing and being seen, than they do with the music that’s supplying the score. That interests me about as much as sitting in the DMV lobby with a few dozen strangers, about as much as going to a crowded dinner party where no one even eats the fucking food. What’s the point?

Big Ears has certainly changed over the years. There are more venues now, and there are more activities outside of its musical core—art shows and film screenings and panels and radio broadcasts. The music industry is starting to show up more and more, too; I remember seeing representatives from what must have been a half-dozen record labels crowded into a single church pew during a 2023 Ichiko Aoba set, how that felt like a real frameshift moment. And perhaps more than ever this year, I met people who were making their first visit to Big Ears and Knoxville, people who had finally given in to the endlessly good word of mouth. This year, I had meetings or at least handshakes and roving hangouts with musicians, editors, managers, publicists, record-label owners, and fellow writers I love who were there for the first time. They had not had the luxury of having their brains rearranged by The Necks in Knoxville in 2009, but they were in pursuit of their own epiphanies.

SML with Jeff Parker and Mikel Patrick Avery at Big Ears 2026.

Indeed, the premise of the festival—getting your mind blown a few times a day—hasn’t changed. On Saturday night—or maybe it was already Sunday morning—I was part of the throng that spilled out of that abandoned Greyhound station, having seen and sweated to the beautiful sixth and final set by SML in three days. I didn’t hear much chatter about deals or management or finding a bar that was still serving. I saw, instead, a bunch of people pulling out their phones or paper schedules to find out who was still playing and where.

Just across the train tracks, Dave Harrington was leading an ad hoc supergroup he called “Pranksters South.” Ryan Davis was playing a late show in a bar called Barley’s in the same direction. As our big horde headed that way, we ran into a train that was stuck on the tracks and had been that way for at least an hour. No one waited for it to get out of the way. A few people crawled beneath the cars, on hands and knees. I climbed over a drawbar, a dangerous maneuver I learned walking across Montana. Each of us set off toward whatever show sounded best in that moment, all smiling against the night.

Jumping the train for Pranksters South. (Photo: Joe Westerlund)

1. A quick disclaimer: I wrote lots and lots of bios for this year’s Big Ears, which were loaded onto their website and festival app and formed the core of their printed program. I also spoke five times. So it is entirely possible that Big Ears is bad, and I am simply a corporate stooge bankrolled by Big Avant. I don’t think that’s true, but I felt like I should mention it, you know?