Last year while on an 8,000 mile road trip I was lucky enough to attend the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. If you haven’t heard of Coachella, it’s a 3-day music festival that gathers hundreds of thousands of people in the California desert to see hundreds of bands and DJs, including headliners like Radiohead and Jay-Z.
As expected, it turned out to rank among the most profound musical experiences of my life.
The lineup for the 2013 edition of Coachella has just been released and the headliners are The Stone Roses, Blur, Phoenix, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. As usual, it’s the performers beneath the surface that make the lineup truly remarkable. Although there are over a hundred, here are the ones that catch my eye in particular:
- Action Bronson
- The XX
- Vampire Weekend
- Wu-Tang Clan
- Tame Impala
- How to Destroy Angels (Trent Reznor)
Fingers crossed that I’m lucky enough to go to Coachella this year, too.
Just for fun, here’s the program that I created for Coachella last year. Of the hundreds of artists on the lineup, these are the ones that I selected each day and did my best to attend.
Friday
- Breakbot
- Explosions in the Sky
- Neon Indian
- Black Keys
- M83
- The Black Angels
- Deerhunter
- The Sheepdogs
- Closer: Amon Tobin
Saturday
- A$AP Rocky
- Jacques Le Cont
- Childish Gambino
- Flying Lotus
- Miike Snow
- High Flying Birds
- Sub Focus
- Zeds Dead
- Closer: Radiohead
Sunday