Kevin Morby Announces This Is A Festival, Featuring Jessica Pratt, Makaya McCraven, Youth Lagoon and More
Kevin Morby and San Francisco’s Noise Pop Industries have officially announced This Is A Festival, a star-studded single-day event set to stage at The Quarry Amphitheater in Santa Cruz, Calif. on Oct. 12. For its inaugural presentation, Morby will lead a hand-selected roster of his favorite peers from the worlds of alternative rock, jazz, indie and more at “Red Rocks in the Redwoods,” celebrating the music culture of the Bay Area and beyond. Among those to be featured alongside the iconic trailblazing singer-songwriter are Jessica Pratt, Youth Lagoon and Makaya McCraven, plus hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart of the How Long Gone podcast.
Just as Morby continues to celebrate the landmark 2022 project This Is a Photograph and the contemplative 2023 follow-up More Photographs (A Continuum), the other artists featured in the referentially-named This Is A Festival lineup are also riding current highs after careers propelled by acclaim. San Francisco’s own Pratt made headlines weeks ago with the release of “HIGHJACK,” her collaboration with cloud rap pathbreaker A$AP Rocky, following her triumphant fourth solo album Here in the Pitch, which arrived in May.
Youth Lagoon, the neo-psych project of San Diego-based artist, was just revived earlier this year after a seven-year hiatus, and the Parisian-born jazz drummer, bandleader and beat scientist McCraven has recently expanded his repertoire beyond such lauded avant-garde dispatches as 2022’s In These Times to feature on works from Brandee Younger, Occidental Brothers Dance Band and Morby himself. Rounding out the bill are 20-year San Francisco indie influencer Ben Kweller and Blackstarkids, the genre-bending indie hip-hop trio based from Morby’s stomping grounds of Kansas City.
“Getting asked to host a festival is very surreal,” Morby offered in the announcement release. “It feels like a dream in which you’re trying to rationalize how all of these different people from your life are somehow in the same place at the same time. In the case of my festival, it’s an absolute dream come true: five of my favorite artists spanning the last twenty years of my life all performing at an amphitheater that will be MC’d by my favorite podcast, How Long Gone. Come watch myself, Jessica Pratt, Youth Lagoon, Ben Kweller, Makaya Mccraven and Blackstarkids share the stage of The Quarry Amphitheater in Santa Cruz this October – which is to really say – come be in my dream! It’s gonna be a blast!”
Tickets for Kevin Morby Presents: This Is A Festival are available now. For more information, visit quarryamphitheater.com.
