I never planned on coming back, and I never thought I'd find myself in the June heat of Manchester, Tennessee for a second time.
But when I was assigned to cover the festival by myself and given media passes the day it started, there I was again.
It’s been three years since I first went to Bonnaroo and not much has changed about the festival.
The stages looked identical to when I visited after my high school graduation, the concession items were still overtly overpriced (a Hattie B's chicken sandwich was $17, can you believe that?) and the stiff smell of sweat and cigarette smoke filled the air every 10 steps I took.
And despite a two year hiatus, the same audience showed up to turn what is normally a vacant lot for 360 days of the year into a wonderland of positivity and community.
But as I sit here writing this in the Bonnaroo press tent thinking about what hasn’t changed about the festival, I can’t help but think about how I’ve changed in the past three years.
It seemed my perspective toward festivals generally changed.
At a particular time in my life, I thought festivals were the coolest thing I could possibly attend as a young adult. But now, I was questioning the thought of packing into the middle of a dense crowd at the tail end of a pandemic to watch an artist who always ended up being blocked by a 6-foot-5-inch guy in front of me. Was it really worth it?
Reflecting on my time at the various venues, I noticed my music taste also changed. I used to run to the bigger stages and watch my favorite EDM DJs like Illenium and NGHTMRE played deep into the night.
But this year, I did not do that. In fact, I didn’t visit the glorified main stage once.
Now, I visited the smaller tents and watched indie artists like The Backseat Lovers, Ashe and Still Woozy in the afternoon and early evening because I can’t stay up as late as I used to (God, is there any way to say that without sounding like a 40-year-old man?).
Side note: I need to thank my friend Garrett for putting me onto Still Woozy because that was probably my favorite show this weekend.
I made an exception to see Flume late Saturday night to indulge my old EDM flame, but I wish I hadn’t. The sleep would’ve been much better, and to say the least, his set was underwhelming. Still, I guess I had to do it just to say I got to see Flume in person, well, barely.
Most obviously, my role for the weekend was the biggest difference this time around. I worked at the festival instead of attending it. I lingered behind the scenes instead of in front of them.
Every day I went out into the Tennessee heat, watched an act or two, interviewed a person or two and went back to the press tent to write. If that sounds dreadful to you, I can assure you it was, but I still found it exhilarating. It’s not every day you get to live backstage behind the festival.
Anyways, all that to say three years is a long time, but it was all the time I needed to find myself down an unexpected path.
It seemed like yesterday when I was at my first Bonnaroo, sitting behind the front-of-house engineers with Robby waiting for Post Malone to play a below-average show on the main stage or drying the floor after Josh flooded the bathroom of the Murfreesboro Holiday Inn Express at 2:00 a.m.
I was young and far less pragmatic back then. I didn’t concern myself with the notion of making money. I was going to commit to becoming like the engineers I envied at every concert and enjoy what I did despite the terrible pay and undesirable hours.
My cliché, romantic personality believed it was much more ideal to live poor and do something cool than live comfortably doing something “boring” in corporate America.
Then, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, I was suddenly a double-major in journalism and the managing editor of the Belmont Vision, working as an intern at the Nashville Business Journal (in a corporate office nonetheless. Oh, the irony).
If only 18-year-old David could see where he was sitting now. He would be livid. “What was I doing writing? I hate writing. I should be out there listening to every artist I can,” he’d probably say.
Until this past weekend, I probably couldn’t tell you why I write, and why I was even at a music festival writing stories for my university’s news site. And not just any stories, but stories no one would even read (In fact if you’re even reading this, thank you for your time).
But then I met Jordan.
I was walking around the Farm looking for people to interview when I decided to walk up to him.
Jordan was a blond, scruffy-looking man sitting under the shade of a tree with a beard as long as his tangled, uncut locks of hair. If I met him outside of Bonnaroo, I’d probably think he was homeless. However, it seemed like he didn’t have anywhere to be, making him the perfect subject for me.
To put it briefly, he was unassuming.
I didn’t expect much out of Jordan. To me, he was just someone I was going to interview about the festival and maybe I’d get a good quote or two out of him.
But Jordan surprised me. The man was attending his fourth Bonnaroo and told me a lot about his life. I learned about his upbringing in a small town outside of St. Louis, his wild times at the University of Missouri and his now quaint life as a software engineer.
This guy? A software engineer? Crazy.
After our interview, we continued our conversation. He asked me why I came to Nashville, and I told him my story. I told him I came to the city for something I thought would be the rest of my life and now have no clue why I’m here.
“Well, that’s okay.” He told me. “It’s okay to have bad experiences. That’s how you know what you don’t want to do, which is just as important in figuring out what you do want to do. We're all just figuring out what to do until we get there."
I’ve heard that many times before, and I shrugged his words off. I thanked him for his time, gave him the obligatory “happy roo” and walked back down the dusty roadway backstage.
He was right, though. And as I walked past the dust clouds, Jordan seemed to embody a mirage of Buddha meditating under the fig tree rather than some homeless-looking man sitting under a tree for protection from the Tennessee sun.
Maybe I write because I’m still exploring what I want to do.
We’re all taught from such a young age to have everything planned out for ourselves, to know what we want to do.
I thought I knew what I was going to do, and because I was certain, I somehow felt superior to those who weren’t. To me, uncertainty was chaos, and chaos was bad. But when the inevitable happened, and I realized my own uncertainty, I spiraled. I did not know what to do.
But through Jordan, I started to learn that uncertainty is part of life, it should be embraced not stigmatized, pursued as an opportunity not shunned.
In my time backstage, I covered Belmont’s Bonnaroo U class and their experiences at the festival.
I always thought I’d be in their shoes, and someone would be writing about me. In a way, I suppose I got close enough.
The Bonnaroo U students also taught me something: never stop looking for your passion, even if you've previously lost it. When I can match the enthusiasm of everyone in that class to explain what I do or what I want to do, I'll know I've found my calling.
When I sat in on one of the class' on-site panels, Ken Weinstein from Big Hassle Media told the students, “The more you do, the more you learn.”
I’ve done a lot and learned a lot across these three years, discovering different parts about myself.
I participated in a studio internship and learned audio wasn’t for me, I joined a student-run newsroom on a whim and found my ability to write and my decision to stay in Nashville for a summer taught me my career had to come before a return to my home state of Texas.
There are so many opportunities I would’ve missed if I didn’t dive into the unknown deep end. Sure, some of it sucked, and for a time, I thought I would drown. But in the end, I emerged knowing my limits and how deep the pool was.
Without uncertainty, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to experience Bonnaroo from the other side of the stage, met people like Jordan or listened to the eager Belmont students who were far more certain in their career choices than I was and couldn’t wait to talk to me about the great time they were having.
Even if I don’t end up with a career in journalism, I found excitement in listening to and telling these people's stories. And at the very least, I learned that, and I'll take that knowledge into my next adventure. Journalism is a part of my journey, and I couldn’t be more blessed to have the opportunity to walk this path.
So, to those who are uncertain, I’m braving the storm with you. If there’s anything certain it’s this: change happens whether we like it or not. It’s a part of life. And though it's impossible to know where the dynamics of life will lead you, we need to learn to accept it and work with the conflicts it introduces.
So do it, whatever it is you’re thinking of. Change your major or add a major, move to the city you’ve been thinking of and explore anything causing disruption in your life because you never know where the road it creates will lead you.
Who knows? It might bring you to Bonnaroo.
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