Days 527-533! Well… as the title says… Bonnaroo was cancelled. And unfortunately it wasn’t cancelled prior to it starting, but we’ll get into that later. Even with this disappointment, my Bonnaroo group and I had a wonderful time in Nashville. I then continued my stay in Nashville at my friend Harrison’s house while I waited for the arrival of my parents!

I woke up on Thursday, June 12th after one of my best nights of sleep at Bonnaroo. It actually got cold enough for me to wear a sweatshirt and I pretty much slept through the entire night! I was rested and ready for some live music!!

Thursday ended up being a fairly hot day (nothing like the Bonnaroo heat I experienced in 2022). But it was enough to keep me hanging at the campsite until around 4pm when I headed in to watch some bands.

I went in with a few people from my camp and as we wandered around, we passed by the iconic Bonnaroo fountain. This year it had a whole face!

As we were walking to the electronic music stage, I heard some bluegrass music on “This Stage” (the Bonnaroo stages are “This,” “That,” “The Other,” “Which,” and “What” just to mess with everyone). It ended up being a band called Kitchen Dwellers! My friends moved on but I stayed for their entire set and had a ball! They were a psychedelic bluegrass jam band and I met a guy named Christian who I chatted to throughout the set.

After that was done, I walked over to the new Bonnaroo stage, called the Infinity Stage. I was very excited for this stage but was a little disappointed with what I experienced (the word disappointment will be used a lot in this post). The stage was supposed to be a 360 sound experience where you could be on any side of the artist performing. But it just sounded like a very loud stage, not an “auditory experience” like we were told it would be.

I left, hopeful that later sets would be better as they worked out the kinks, and headed to meet my friends at The Other Stage where the electronic music was. We watched a DJ named Azzecca and then I headed back to This Stage to see a band called The Lemon Twigs.

I had never heard of them but they were a Beach Boys adjacent group which was fun! They even played a couple Beach Boys songs at the end of their set, probably commemorating Brian Wilson if I had a guess.

I then met my friends back at the electronic stage and enjoyed the end of the Max Styler set and the start of the Green Velvet set. Now here comes the craziness…

We headed over to meet our group at the Of the Trees back to back with Tape B at the Infinity stage and it was PACKED. We were able to get to our friends before it was super duper packed but it kept getting more and more cramped. Even with how big the stage was, Bonnaroo was NOT prepared for how many people wanted to be at the set.

It got to a point where so many people were shoving in and trying to get closer that a few of us decided to leave and go to another set. We headed to a set I didn’t have any plans of going to, the country artist Luke Combs.

It was actually a pretty good performance! Not only did we have plenty of room at the What Stage, but I knew more songs than I thought. Also he brought out Miranda Lambert during his set AND Jon Bellion at another point. They sang the song “Good Things Fall Apart,” which is a song I really like and was very unexpected.

The next set was another DJ, from Australia, Dom Dolla. It was an okay set but then my friend Tambo and I headed to This Stage one final time to catch a set I had been VERY curious about… The Insane Clown Posse (ICP).

I didn’t expect to stay very long at this set, their music isn’t really for me. But they put on a show!! Their music is kind of similar to the Beastie Boys with rap songs about social commentary. But then add clown face paint, dancing clowns on stage, and Faygo… lots and lots of Faygo. I knew part of their shtick was spraying the crowd with this soda… but I didn’t realize how much. Almost every song they would bring out bottles and buckets and dump them onto the crowd. They’d even bottle rocket the bottles to the back of the tent… it was WILD!

Thankfully I was very far away from the stickiness of it all. But it was an experience I was glad I got to see in person.

We called it a night and headed back to camp. What we didn’t realize though was that was going to be our last official set of Bonnaroo 2025.

We woke up on Friday, June 13th to an overcast day. The radar was full of rain and by 1pm it had begun.

I was mentally preparing myself for the wet day on the farm and was about to spend the entire day inside the festival… and then the first rain delay text came out from Bonnaroo. The rain kept coming and going and Bonnaroo kept delaying the start of the day. Until eventually we received a text no one was expecting.

“We are beyond gutted, but we must make the safest decision and cancel the remainder of Bonnaroo.”

This caused a ton of mixed emotions across all of Outeroo (where the camps are). Thankfully Bonnaroo immediately said they’d refund 75% of our ticket cost since we already had one full day of the 4… otherwise there would’ve been pandemonium.

All we could do was hang around camp and go to whatever “renegade” sets (put on by festival goers) for the rest of the night.

My friend Harrison, whose DJ name is AYCH, was about to play a set at the plaza of our campground… but right as he was about to Bonnaroo safety team shut it down. It would’ve easily been one of the biggest sets of the weekend but it was definitely another way too packed situation. So instead we threw a set at our campground and a couple hundred people showed up!

The following day, Saturday June 14th, our camp woke up early and started to pack our soggy campsite up before the next round of rain.

It was very sad and disappointing having to pack up early and leave, what was supposed to be, a weekend of amazing music, amazing people, and dancing…

We were able to pack up before the rain came, but the campgrounds were chaos. The porta potties hadn’t been cleaned in over 24 hours, the line of cars to leave the campgrounds weren’t moving, and there were very very few volunteers or emergency staff around. Live Nations (the company that now runs Bonnaroo) really dropped the ball this year.

We slowly made our way to Nashville, where our group leader, Mia, had booked us a large Airbnb for some of us. Most of our groop was dispersed across Nashville so the weekend was far from over!

Saturday night ended up being a chill one for most of us. Because there were so many artists and concert goers in the city, a lot of the artists put on last minute shows… but they were selling out faster than you could blink! Also some of them were way overpriced. A small group of people at the Airbnb were able to snag tickets to a show, the rest of us went out for barbecue and relaxed at the Airbnb (which had a pool table).

There’s a DJ named INZO currently playing one of my friend Harrison’s songs in his DJ set. And at the concert that night he brought him up on stage in front of thousands of people! It was turning into a big weekend for him, which our group was very happy for! A silver lining of the weekend!

Harrison played a headlining set that night but I needed rest… but on Sunday, June 15th, we got the chance to watch him perform!

Also on Sunday, my EP released on all streaming platforms!!

My EP, Life’s a Trip, contains 3 new songs and the two singles already released:

• Life of a Traveling Boy
• English Heartbreak
• The Motorbiking Song
• Koh Tao
• Loneliness

The 5 songs on Life’s a Trip encapsulate my experience traveling across SE Asia and the last song, Loneliness, is for my time in Australia. Now, if you’ve been following the blog for a while, you might understand more than others what I’m singing about. But I think these songs turned out amazing and even without any context they are fun to listen to… and that I get to listen to them alongside my favorite artists is super cool!

I’m looking forward to hearing what you think of them, let me know in the comments! I guess the next thing to figure out is how to promote them and start playing them live around the US and the world!

Harrison’s show was at 2pm, but even though it’s a Sunday, we would’ve still been at Bonnaroo listening to music. So we got ready to go enjoy the show.

Not only did we get to see our friend DJ his own music, we got to see him DJ with two really big producers, Effin and GorillaT. In the DJ world, it’s called a B2B (back to back) and the DJs take turns playing a song and mixing it into the previous song.

My friend Troy made us all fun pearler bead necklaces to wear and one of Effins staff randomly handed me a signed Effin card which is pretty cool! Perks of being at a smaller venue I guess. And also Effin’s photographer snagged a couple fun pictures of Troy and I in our outfits… weirdly right outside of the bathroom.

I of course also had to take a selfie with Harrison to commemorate the big day!

We went back to the Airbnb and ended up staying there the rest of the night. A bunch of our group from Bonnaroo came over to hang as well which was a lot of fun! It might not have been the weekend we were expecting… but it was a very fun weekend still!

On Monday, June 16th, my friend Tambo and I said our see you laters and Ubered to my friend Harrison’s house.

We were beat after the many late nights this weekend and immediately fell asleep on Harrison’s couch.

Not much else went happened on Monday, we ran some errands with Harrison, listened to some of his unreleased tracks on the way, and dropped Tambo off at the airport. I was staying with Harrison until Friday. We watched a movie, called mid90s, with his friend Lauren. It was a artsy movie directed by Jonah Hill about a kid finding his community through skating. It was a good and interesting movie, it made me think a fair amount.

I actually had some work to do on Tuesday, June 17th and so did Harrison. When he’s not DJ-ing he’s out detailing cars. I had video editing work to do for my friend Jack, who produced my EP. We exchanged the last payment of producing for me editing a video for him! It was a nice exchange, but he was finally cashing in his side of the deal.

I spent the morning filling out an application to be a volunteer teacher at a school in Honduras and the rest of the day was spent working on the video for Jack. I got it to a point that it was ready for him to look at and give his thoughts on. We’ll have a call about it when we can line up our schedules and timezones.

The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing. Harrison and I went and got street tacos from a nearby food truck for dinner. And watched YouTube on his comfy couch.

I also ended up buying train tickets to go hang out with my Bonnaroo Omaha friends for a weekend in July!! One of them had extra Amtrak gift cards and offered them to me if I came to hang! So another fun weekend to look forward to.

My application for the school in Honduras was well received and I scheduled a FaceTime with the volunteer recruiter the following night!

Wednesday, June 18th started off with a sleep in and another relaxing start to the day. I noodled and practiced soloing on a guitar while Harrison listened to some DJ sets. I also worked on my blog post for the week as well.

Later in the day I had a phone call with producer Jack about the video I was working on for him. It was very nice getting to chat and catch up! We also have a more aligned vision for the video, which of course is helpful.

Harrison and I did some more jamming, on his electric guitar this time. We listened to different backing tracks and one of us would follow the rhythm guitar and the other would solo on top of it. It was a lot of fun! My fingers got sore and a little blistered from all the playing.

I had another call today with the volunteer coordinator at the school in Honduras I applied to yesterday. We chatted about what the job would entail and any questions I might have. I thought it’d be more of an interview, but there wasn’t really any and I had the position! I just need to let them know when I want to be picked up from the airport.

I hadn’t had chipotle since leaving the US. I finally changed that tonight and enjoyed a big burrito bowl for dinner.

Overall, it was a good week. There’s a lot I could gripe about and continue to feel down about… but what’s the point! Rain cancelled Bonnaroo, but there’s not much we could’ve done about it. We made the most of the rest of the weekend which was still a blast!

I’m looking forward to a couple more days with Harrison and then getting to hang out with my parents some more too!

See you in a week!

– Elie