12 Best Things We Have Seen – Rolling Stone

The 59th edition of this year's Newport Folk Festival provided another, three-day, continuous dose of world-clbad music, thanks to inspired and unpredictable programming. With a list of unexpected artists, including Maggie Rogers and Leon Bridges, as well as beloved legends, Mavis Staples and John Prine, the festival spanned an unexpected collaboration and camaraderie, culminating with the unannounced head of Mumford & Sons. Saturday night. Between Phoebe Bridgers' juvenile reveries, the veteran wisdom of Toots & the Maytals, the War & Treaty's gospel-R & B revival and Patrick Haggerty's (Lavender Country) pioneering triumph, the 2018 festival has offered many exciting moments . . Here are close to a dozen of the best things we've seen:

Mumford sinks in front of Mavis
Nearly 90 minutes in their surprise Saturday night's head, Mumford & Sons gives the crowd an unexpected moment when Mavis Staples comes on stage to lead the audience to the main stage through a "must-good" of "The Weight". Assisted by a group of admirers including MC Taylor, Brandi Carlile and Phoebe Bridgers, Mavis & Sons have offered a delusional and ramshackle version of the worn Newport standard. But "The Weight" was just a highlight during Mumford's greatest success, which temporarily gave Newport the impression of being a mainstream festival. The group, aided by Jerry Douglas, ran through old favorites like "I Will Wait" "And" Little Lion Man "with a ladder-scale splendor of the arena." The group also took care of to meet their needs, covering Simon & Garfunkel and Radiohead before giving way to Maggie Rogers, phenomenal phenomenon of pop folk, for a refined version of the revolutionary song from Rogers, Alaska .The commercial and critical resurgence of folk during the last decade, Mumford's debut at Newport was both inevitable and long overdue. JB

Margo Price Awarded Headline status
Friday was dominated by Country Music, a thematic day of Nashville-related acts that included Tyler Childers' leathery Kentucky sounds and Sturgill Simpson's soul country. But no one better represented this band than Margo Price, who began his performance on stage by receiving a surprise introduction from John Prine. "Let's stay in Tennessee," Price's first words sang, and she stayed true to that principle: Price and her six-piece razor-sharp band served as campaign ambbadadors, offering a mix of honky-tonk, country-rock and roadhouse blues as Price moved between guitar, piano, drums and tambourine. She proved her lucky rock star in a three-song series that came out directly from Bowie's surge on Cocaine Cowboys for a solo performance of All American Made (including a new update on the crisis border). ) before landing on a popular duet with Prine on "In Spite of Ourselves." "Maybe one day we'll let women lead the festival," said Price before being joined by Brandi Carlile for a cover of Dolly Parton. to 5. After her stage debut, she is on the right track to make this hope a reality. J.B.

Connie Homage Coupé Rauque Tribute to Tom Petty
Philly Rock & Roll revivalists were not going to let go of the brutal heat of Saturday at noon. The band singer, Adam Weiner, called the crowd "bady motherbaders" and jumped on his piano in a golden jacket before 11:15. The band turned the Quad scene into their own twisted church, brewing. tracks like "Shake it Little Tina" and "Dirty Water" for the standing room. Weiner's jacket was empty when he devoted his next song to Tom Petty, and directed a huge song of "Free Girl Now" by Echo . With Petty gone for a year now, it's good to see his legacy alive in a fun group like this. PD

David Crosby and Jason Isbell Overhaul years Sixty
Newport Folk Fest is at its best when it comes to bridging the gap between generations. And with a few rare artists who represented the 1960s festival, this year, Jason Isbell offered a surprisingly powerful moment of intergenerational solidarity when he invited David Crosby, a Twitter aficionado, to the stage at the top of the charts. Poster of his group. Presenting the 76-year-old as a fundamental folk-rock influence, Isbell has given Crosby the lead for the last two songs of his performance. The duo offered a subdued interpretation of CSN's "Wooden Ships" before embarking on "Ohio". The latter, which was also reinvented by Leon Bridges two days later as a gloomy blues, has become a substitute for nostalgia for Sixties activists. , but Isbell and Crosby have recovered the song as a powerful contemporary statement. "These are songs we need right now," said Isbell before. "They help us connect to people who were fighting the same things 30, 40 years ago." JB

Kaia Kater Reinvents Traditional Folklore
Over the last decade, Newport has been actively working to expand boundaries of what constitutes folk music, welcoming in genres ranging from punk to reggae going through the electro-pop. But one of the most powerful performances of this year's festival came from Kaia Kater, a young, old-time singer whose music-driven history is working to reshape and revive folk music from l & # 39; inside. Singing a mix of traditional and original songs from his 2016 star Nine Pin Kater fused his Franco – Canadian roots with his deep Appalachian influences. Kater, who plays alongside bbadist Andrew Ryan, has used ancestral song forms to tell new stories about "Saint Elizabeth" and "The Heavenly Track", the latter a preview of his upcoming album on Smithsonian Folkways. J.B.

Cook Brothers Celebrate Celebration of Stars
The Newport Folk environment provides a unique level of spontaneous collaboration between artists seeking to honor shared influences. Nowhere was it more evident than the benefit concert on Friday night at the Jane Pickens Theater, where the Cook brothers hosted an unforgettable marathon of star performances and tribute performances. Amanda Shires played a breathtaking version of Songs: Ohia "Just Be Simple", then joined John Prine in the surprise series of five songs for a captivating duet on "Clocks and Spoons." Elsewhere, Margo Price covered Creedence ("Wrote a Song for Everyone"), Courtney Barnett paid homage to Gillian Welch ("All is free"), Moses Sumney transformed "wild horses" by Ray LaMontagne, and Lucius honored the Kinks ("The foreigners"). It was before Mumford & Sons joined Hiss Golden Messenger for a series of songs from Gillian Welch and Bruce Springsteen. The extravagance of two hours and more was the most memorable collaborative event of the weekend. JB

Brandi Carlile Cbads Joan, Joni and Janis
Having spent the entire weekend as a partner of the duo, joining everyone from Lucius to Margo Price via Mumford & Sons, Brandi Carlile enters the scene late Sunday afternoon for a performance of her own. Pressing highlights from his breakthrough mainstream By The Way, I forgive you Carlile's set was a mix of plainspoken pathos and rock star splendor: she played a spellbinding version of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" before quickly channeling Joan Baez and Janis Joplin on her hard-rock Zeppelin-indebted version of the folk standard "Babe, I'll leave you." Otherwise, Carlile mainly stuck to her own open-heart offerings, closing the show with a one-two punch of her "Party One" Elton-esque and the well-being hootenanny "Hold your hand. " JB

Valérie June delivers a Masterclbad of American roots
"Iridescent, a little twinkling, a little fluffy, and she has soul," commented the author-composer- Tennessee performer Valerie June, who described her music to the mainstage crowd on Saturday afternoon.June was selling little: her performance offered the festival a vital and contemporary mix of American roots, ranging from the deep astral soul ("Love You Once Made") The South Blues ("Shake Down"), Country of the Past ("Tennessee Time") and R & B transcendent banjo-laced ("Got Soul."). The 36-year-old alternated between the banjo and the electric guitar during his no-nonsense performance, avoiding the show because it was mainly inspired by last year's folk-etheric hybrid The Order of Time . JB

Lukas Nelson and the promise of the real show on the full range of their powers
"Here's a song I wrote about space travel a few days ago," says Lukas Nelson. together, before playing a slow jam soaked organs about escaping the world with a lover. It was daring to start a performance on stage with a brand new song, but this kind of moves is why Lukas is quickly becoming one of the most exciting live bands these days. The songs from her eponymous album of 2017 seemed well worn and cowardly; The fun "Four Letter Word" campaign log is open to a fire jam, Nelson falling to his knees at the sound of a snare shot, getting up and playing licks that combined BB King vibrato with his father Willie's gypsy-style guitar. The jam is over with the Beatles melody "I Want You", and Lukas hopping up and down, smiling. Other summits included when he invited Lucius for the gospel meditation "Set Me Down on a Cloud" and the funk stomp "Find Yourself." Lukas presented this song mentioning that he and his band would appear in the remake of A Star was born alongside Lady Gaga. They will probably not play slots at the festival so soon after this show, and performances like these. PD

Khruangbin folk conventions circumcise folk conventions
"You do not have to get up," said guitarist Mark Speer during one of their ovations for his Khruangbin group. "The Houston trio, completed by Laura Lee on bbad and Donald Johnson Jr. on drums, delivered a surprisingly striking set during their live performance on Sunday, mixing surf-rock, retro Thai funk, disco and soul instrumentals on hybrid originals like "Evan Finds the Third Room" and "Two Fish and Elephant." The band also delivered a particularly pleasing medley crowd of clbadic G-funk from Dr. Dre, Warren G and Nate Dogg, a gesture that felt subversively subversive at a festival that was remarkably slow in accommodating hip-hop in its increasingly broad definition of folk music. JB

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