Live music was once the center of my young adult life. Road tripping from venue-to-venue. Mountains, gorges or rolling hills backdropping stages. Foggy memories of great music, and artists I’d forgotten by the time their sets ended. Drenched by sun or rain, it didn’t matter. The music was fuel for the soul. We’d laugh, dance and party like the night wouldn’t end. Sometimes it didn’t. If open to the experience, you’d feel like you were part of it all.
The deeper connection I once felt has been gone for some time. Other priorities shifted to the front burner and years passed until driving hours away for a concert or festival has barely been a fleeting thought.
Hinterland Music Festival was the first one in a long time in which I felt a magnetic pull to attend. Hinterland is held annually in early August in the rural Iowa countryside of Saint Charles, a 650-person community 30 minutes south of Des Moines. The area is best known for its famed covered bridges. Thousands of fans pack onto a natural grass slope of the Avenue of the Saints Amphitheater, often in unrelenting summer heat. A 100-plus-square-foot stage sits at the bottom with rolling fields of timber in the distance.
Billed as Iowa’s largest, the festival has grown since its inception in 2015, boasting three days of camping and music genres ranging from country, folk and blues to indie, pop and punk. Hinterland offers a mix of bigger names and artists you probably don’t know yet but will appreciate discovering. Plus, it embraces Iowa’s subtly beautiful natural landscape. Iowa has been my home for more than 20 years, and I figured if I want to have nice things here, I should support it.
So, this year I committed. Held Friday through Sunday, Aug 2-4, Hozier, Noah Kahan and Vampire Weekend were booked as headliners, and I recognized a few others in the lineup including Mt. Joy, Hippo Campus and Charley Crockett. The organizers have a knack for plucking artists just before they hit it big. Past years have seen Zach Bryan, Maggie Rogers and Tyler Childers. This year, Chappell Roan was the name that blew up, this time weeks before the festival was finished selling passes. The alt-pop sensation has been called an instant queer pop icon, and was certainly the buzziest act of the weekend.
I didn’t really care who was playing. I wanted to see what the festival had to offer: the camping, new bands, late night sets, blazing sun, dehydration, dirty everything.
As I drove over from Iowa City after work on Friday, I sized up what I was most curious about. What type of crowd does the festival draw? What would the vibe be like? What is the scene at the campgrounds? How prevalent are drugs and alcohol? Which artists would stand out? Can Iowa deliver a top-level music festival? Have festivals changed? Have I changed?
Sensory overload, likely oversold
Upon first entering on Friday evening, an anxious, overwhelming feeling crept over as I waded through a chaotic scene of tightly packed bodies where aisles should be. I marched further and further back up the hill looking for a spot to sit, or at least take a deep breath. The brutal heat coupled with the crush of people had me close to fainting. I finally squeezed in near the very back fence line behind an inflatable sofa.
Attendees came from near and far, spending hundreds of dollars or more on tickets alone, to find lengthy lines for filling water, buying merchandise, catching shuttles, and entering and exiting the venue. Room to move, much less sit, was in short supply. Musicians halted their sets more than a few times for fans in distress during the heat of the day.
“Wait, cut the track,” The Japanese House singer Amber Bain intervened during a song on day three. “Can we get a medic over there, please, immediately? … Anytime anyone is freaking out, just wave at me and I’ll stop, because I don’t care, and you guys shouldn’t be fainting in the fucking burning sun.”
After the show ended on day one, around 11:30 p.m., I passed by a line of non-campers waiting for a free shuttle to Des Moines, which was new this year. Three or four people side-by-side were stretched for a quarter mile in ditches on either side of the street. I was heading to the campfire stage for after-hours performances. When I walked back around 1 a.m., hundreds of people were still waiting with no real alternative. Poor bastards.
Avenue of the Saints Amphitheater had a capacity of 18,000 people when it opened in 2013. The Madison County Sheriff’s Office stated on its Facebook page on Aug. 2 that organizers told them to expect 20,000 people. Official attendance numbers have not been released. I submitted requests for an interview and questions to Hinterland staff.
Numerous attendees told me how much bigger the festival was than previous years, lamenting the more intimate settings of the past. Blasted on social media for putting profits over safety after the first day, organizers changed their policies to allow outside water in the festival grounds, added more water stations and made adjustments that reduced wait times.
An ‘unexpectedly queer,’ ‘stacked’ lineup
Should the overflowing crowd be attributed to Hinterland’s growing stature, a different marketing strategy, the lineup or something else? Fans from Maine to California, New York, West Virginia, Washington and more, said they made the trip because Hinterland had assembled so many artists that were on their wish list.
“The lineup is stacked,” a young woman from New York told me on day three while killing time in queue until the gates opened. A friend of hers from Washington flew to New York and they made an adventure of it. It was their first time in Iowa.
Orville Peck, the penultimate act on day one, caught my attention with a story about Willie Nelson wanting to do a song about gay cowboys. “Well, I am a gay cowboy,” Peck said, leading into the country ballad, “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other.”
Molly Martin, an indie rocker from Nashville, told the crowd about being five years sober during a late-night set. “You choose what you surround yourself with and who you surround yourself with,” she said.
Hinterland was my first real live music experience without alcohol in 30 years or so. I can’t say it was better, but it was certainly different and a lot less expensive.
A few of the artists I’ve been hooked on since Hinterland include The Japanese House (on repeat), Flipturn, Red Clay Strays, Mt. Joy and Lizzy McAlpine.
It was hard not to get swept up in the excitement for Chappell Roan. Pink — cowboy hats, scarves, T-shirts, you name it —was the hue of the day in tribute to Roan. Booked before her April 5, 2024 single “Good Luck, Babe!” rocketed to the the top of the charts this summer, Roan was scheduled mid-card on Sunday. She took stage at 5 p.m. with her and her band all dressed in nun outfits, banging out one poppy tune after the next. The audience knew all the words.
A couple hours later, Noah Kahan would tell the audience, “I may be the headliner, but I’m really here for Chappell Roan,” and called her set “the most electric shit ever.”
Andrew Fuller, a festival-goer and award-winning cake designer from Des Moines, created an outfit based on Roan’s cheer hit “Hot to Go”: a pink suit with burnt fringes, a tie of cigarettes, a contraption that made smoke billow off his chest, and a gas can that served as his water bottle. Describing why so many have embraced Roan, Fuller said, “She’s unexpectedly queer. She’s unexpectedly brash. She lifts up the queer community.”
Beyond the music
Attending as a member of the media, I camped in an area for vendors, volunteers and festival staff. My minimalist set-up consisted of a four-person tent, folding chair, small aluminum table for making pour-over coffee and a lantern for night. Surrounding me were more seasoned festival-goers with canopies, tapestries for shade, grills, stoves, rocking chairs and portable fire pits. From camp, you could hear the band onstage.
A camp neighbor had started a small fire on Friday evening. The Chicagoan was camped with two women from St. Louis. They met at Hinterland years ago and reconnect each year at the festival. While the music is still first-rate, Hinterland has lost some of the chill factor that helped get the festival established, they told me.
Before the music started on Saturday, I wandered around the campground looking for a hammocking spot. A group of college students on break from Iowa State invited me to sit in the shade and play the card game Skip-Bo. They volunteered earlier in the week to help set up the venue in exchange for admission.
Perhaps because of the oppressive temperature, which topped 100 on the heat index, alcohol and drunkenness weren’t a noticeable issue, and aside from a little marijuana smoke here and there, neither were drugs — in the venue or campgrounds.
Despite the snafus at water stations and entrance gates, fans stayed in good spirits, displaying kindness for one another and allowing the music to push aside the heat and other logistical issues. I certainly did.
The important question for organizers is whether the once intimate homegrown festival has grown too big for its own good, and what changes can they make to keep it healthy.
During an interview before the 2023 festival, Hinterland founder Sam Summers described 15,000 people as the sweet spot.
“I am not going to do it just to do it,” Summers said. “It is really stressful, but it is worth it right now. So, I figure this keeps going forever, right now in my mind, I’d like to keep it intimate — 15,000 is intimate for a festival. Bonnaroo or some of these others are like 100,000. That’s a lot of people. Keeping it single-stage. That is something that is important to me. Keeping it in the country is important. Those things will stay constant, and we’ll work around with line ups and branding each year.”
