The Lost Woods Music Festival returns to the Cedar Falls area for its third iteration on Saturday. What started as a party in the woods in 2023 has… kept on being a party in the woods, actually. Salt Fox, the band behind the fest, have resisted the scope creep that plagues so many other festival […]
Cedar Falls music
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Almost too magical to be true, Lost Woods Festival brought stellar Iowa musicians, cozy furniture and spellbinding vibes in its second year
A mysterious secret location? Tick. A stunning line up of Iowa’s best bands? Tick. Delicious local food trucks? Tick. What’s not to love? With this in mind, I started the ninety-minute road trip from Iowa City to Cedar Falls with high expectations.
Posted inFood & Drink
LV Recommends: The new food menu at Octopus, Cedar Falls’ accidentally iconic music venue, makes it even harder to ever go home
I arrived at the Octopus in Cedar Falls for the first time on a Friday around 6 p.m., hoping to catch the weekly 5 o’clock Free Chicken Wings special, a tradition/homage to the old crew that ran Stebs. Clocking the where-are-the-wings look on my face, the bartender chuckled good-naturedly and said, “Yeah, we had a […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Rush Cleveland, elder statesman of Iowa blues, will celebrate a banner year in Cedar Falls Saturday before competing in the International Blues Challenge
At every step in roughly six decades of making music, Rush Cleveland’s remained true to himself. He doesn’t use a setlist, preferring instead to read the audience and go with his gut. And he’s a living encyclopedia of American music — “From Muddy to Merle and all points in between,” he likes to say. Yet […]
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Joel Sires — ‘Dog Years’
Dog Years by Joel Sires To paraphrase the famous Corinthians Bible passage, Joel Sires — songwriter and frontman for Cedar Falls band TWINS — set aside his “childish ways” for the songs on their last album, Dream On, out earlier this year. That new maturity on record is a result of woodshedding new songs at […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
From Lizzo’s ‘Cuz I Love You’ to Migo’s ‘Culture II,’ engineer/mixer Sean Phelan is making his mark — and doing Cedar Rapids proud
“I moved directly on out to Los Angeles, sight unseen. Just did kinda the cliche: pack your bags and go.” Sean Phelan is self-effacing when he tells his story, as though it all happened to him — as though he’s the luckiest guy in the world. But demand is rising for the skills of the […]
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Precious — He Has Abandoned Us
Precious is Cedar Falls’ Oliver Weilein, and “He Has Abandoned Us” is a concept album based around the story of a man (of unspecified historic time) who loses his family to the plague and retires to an abandoned temple to beseech God, who never answers him.
