HomeGrown Music Festival 2021 Lineup
A look back at the 6th Annual HomeGrown Music Festival at Regner Park in West Bend. Check out this playlist on Spotify.
The Belle weather
The Belle Weather recently played at The Bend and they were incredible.
Who knew an all-acoustic indie rock band with no drummer could rock the shoes off our feet?
Lead singer Eric Cox soars through each song while the backing string trio of Tom Abromaitis (upright bass), Thea Vorass (cello), Marisa Sheppard (violin) burns and thrashes behind him. It’s beautiful, complicated, mixed-metaphor music that is equal parts volatile and sublime. We’re so excited to announce they will be playing on the Silver Lining Stage on July 11 for Homegrown 2021.
Sun Silo
Every year, we attend dozens of shows, hear from a hundred different bands, and listen to thousands of hours of music. We’re just as excited to settle in with new music from an old favorite as we are to discover someone new.
Kenosha’s Sun Silo is part of a cohort of great young indie psych bands that are writing and recording new music, while touring remains elusive in the pandemic era. Their self-recorded album Paper Cuts came out in late 2019 and we were so taken with their blissful, piano-driven, art rock that we had to invite them this summer.
The Sapsuckers
You know that feeling when you hear a new band that sounds immediately warm, familiar, and inviting? The Sapsuckers are that band, with a sound as authentic as a river valley and as modern as yesterday’s fresh wildflowers.
Songwriters Nikki Grossman (fiddle, guitar) and Joe Hart (mandolin, guitar) create Driftless hillbilly pop music that wraps big emotions up in vocal harmonies and classic country instrumentation that has you tapping your feet and dabbing your eyes. We can’t wait to watch them open the festival on July 11! Their new album was recorded during the pandemic, and isn’t quite available yet, but you can stream their music all over the place.
The NILE CLUB
When The Nile Club singer/guitarist Samuel Walters played a solo set at Dunn Bros. Coffee on the Saturday before Homegrown 2016, he was still in high school and had yet to team up with singer/guitarist Malachi Kaehne, drummer/singer Samwise Baker, and bassist/singer Malachai Devlin.
Powered by 4 young songwriters, The Nile Club plays a mash of noisy genres: punk, psych, shoegaze, and indie rock. Their first record, Motions, was released digitally in 2019 and they were able to perform in venues across southern Wisconsin before places starting shutting down in 2020. Now living in Milwaukee, the band is hard at work on a follow-up record and we’re incredibly proud to have them playing the Silver Lining Stage on July 11.
Christopher Gold
Born in Kentucky, raised in religion, broken by punk rock, moved to Wisconsin where he put together a scrappy and amp-shredding roots rock band. Gold is the only performer to play all 6 years of the prestigious Mile of Music festival and he is the driving force behind an annual Christmas fundraising effort to raise money for toys for kids living at Harbor House, a domestic abuse service in the Fox Valley. When the pandemic hit, Gold found himself unable to perform so he began a podcast from his couch at home where he plays songs and talks about anything and everything.
His lyric-heavy folk tunes are given firepower by his backing band, The New Old Things. We can’t wait to hear them play on July 11, but in the meantime, we’re stuffing our ears with their music
LOUD LIBRARY
Homegrown is not just run by people who love music, many of the volunteers are also musicians themselves. That said, we know what it’s like to be a young band working hard to get your music heard in a crowded scene.
A band like Loud Library, who came to us via their super catchy single “Recycle Bin” on Bandcamp, has a handful of tracks on the site and a handful of live performances under their belts, but we gotta admit we don’t know a whole lot about them. We were taken by their exuberantly poppy alternative rock sound and look forward to their set on July 11. Listen to their EPs and single over at Bandcamp and watch for an interview with the band coming soon.
DUSK
Appleton’s DUSK has been on that list multiple times, but this is the year they’ll actually be playing at the festival. Dusk describes themselves as garage R&B, psychedelic country, or primitive rock. We just think they play music that makes us want to dance and sing along.
Built on the powerful vocals of keyboardist Julia Blair and bass player Amos Pitch, Dusk creates songs that meander darkly over warm beds of chiming guitars, pedal steel, and feedback. It’s a grimy, blue-collared midwestern music with oil on its hands and a hangover.
They complete a HomeGrown lineup covers the rock music spectrum from punk to folk to roots to psychedelic. We can’t wait to hear the bands, smell the corn, and feel the sun warming our cold winter bones.