If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that inlate 2022 I exchanged the mild winters, blazing summers, and wildfires of Sacramento, California for the frozen winters, warm summers, and fried cheese curds of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of the reasons I love it here in Milwaukee is music… and more specifically, the world’s largest music festival, Summerfest.

I usually hate music festivals, but instead of being in themiddle of the desert with terrible food and porta-potties, Summerfest is on modern festival grounds on the shores of Lake Michigan, and they’ve got real food (General Tso’s Cauliflower made by a Top Chef runner-up) and real bathrooms (regularly maintained). Summerfest features eleven main stages, several side stages, and more than 200 bands over three weekends, usually at the end of June and beginning of July.

I love Summerfest so much, I featured it in the openingchapters of The Executive Murder, last year’s Woodhead & Beckerrelease. It was slightly fictionalized—the names of the different stages weren’t
real—but I wanted to capture the vibe of the show. And because there are so many stages, there’s something for everyone: rock, EDM, country, metal, folk, rap, and everything in between. Country and metal aren’t really my thing, but there’s plenty of genres I do like every single day.

My love of Summerfest dovetails with one of the other greatthings about Milwaukee: the live music scene. There are a dozen concert venues within a half-mile of Water Street and Wisconsin Avenue, the heart of downtown, and that’s less than a ten-minute drive for me. Most of the big names hit Milwaukee, and many of the smaller bands do, too. And especially compared to the concerts in California, the tickets are pretty reasonable. Summerfest is no exception: I always get a full 9-day pass for Christmas, which this year was $60. (I saw 27 artists this year at Summerfest—that’s less than $3 per set!)

Over the last few years, I’ve discovered many of my new favoritebands and artists because of Summerfest: Cafuné, Japanese Breakfast, Ask Carol, Angélica García, and many more. Some of my favorite bands play in the early afternoon, when the grounds aren’t packed with people as when the headliners attract thousands to each of the stages.

This year was no different: yes, I saw famous headliners like James Taylor, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me, and The Killers, and I saw old 80s and 90s artists like Wang Chung (super fun!) and Everclear. But to me, the best shows were the new discoveries of *aya, Capital Soirée, Pink Halo, Marielle Kraft, and Collections of Colonies of Bees. I also loved artists who I’d never heard of—who I really should have heard of by now!—like Betty Who, Walt Disco, and Allison Russell.

The three weekends of Summerfest are now over, and I’malready looking forward to next year… and going to these shows has already given me ideas I can use in future books!