Q's With Drew Holcomb: Moon River's Artist-Curator-Founder Keeps It Family For Growing Fest

Cora Wagoner – Drew Holcomb
CHATTANOOGA CHOOSER: Drew Holcomb, the founder of Moon River Music Festival, not only curates the lineup but performs in it, too, during the 2018 edition in Chattanooga, Tenn. The event has grown from a “family picnic” style get together into one of the best small festivals in the country.

Artist-curated music festivals have come into vogue the last couple of years, with names like Astroworld (Travis Scott), but musician Drew Holcomb, 36, of Nashville-based Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors, got a jump on the trend with the debut of Moon River Music Festival in 2014.

With the help of his manager and business partner, Paul Steele, of Triple 8 Management, Holcomb and his band gathered up several of his tourmates and musical friends and staged a concert at Levitt Shell in Memphis, Tenn., intended to be a kind of “family picnic” to show off his hometown and play some good music.

It was so successful that it outgrew its Memphis home as well as the ability of Holcomb and Steele to handle the logistics required to stage a larger festival. And he still had a band and a music career to tend to.

In 2018, with new partner AC Entertainment, Moon River Music Festival decamped to Chattanooga where, in its first year in the new location, it quickly sold out and earned a Pollstar Awards nomination for Best Festival Under 30,000 Capacity, alongside such notable entries as Newport Folk Festival, Hangout Music Festival, Desert Daze, Forecastle (also produced by AC Entertainment) and Ohana Fest.

Moon River Music Festival takes place Sept. 7-8 and features a lineup including Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit, St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Johnnyswim, Moon Taxi, The Wood Brothers, Josh Ritter, The Lone

Bellow, The Suffers, The Oh Hellos and, of course, Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors. It sold out in 24-hours.

Pollstar: You started Moon River Music Festival in Memphis on your own. What was your vision for it at that time?

Drew Holcomb: The first year we did it was 2014 and, at that point, I had been touring and making music for almost 10 years. My hometown had been very good to me and I was kind of imagining a festival that was kind of like a family reunion of sorts, in order to bring bands that I had met on the road to my hometown, to showcase my hometown, and to share these bands with a lot of folks who may not have known them.

What was your primary inspiration to throw a festival?

There’s a band called Lucero that’s done what they called the Family Picnic. They’d done it for years. Grace Potter’s Grand Point North up in Vermont kind of inspired me. Mumford & Sons’ Gentlemen of the Road festival is another.

Who did you invite to that first festival?

Let’s see, the first year we had The Dirty Guv’nahs, a band out of Knoxville, we had Will Hoge, Holly Williams, Judah & The Lion and a few others.

Artist-curated festivals seem to be the rage now. How did you keep Moon River going?

I love the idea of an artist-curated festival. The first year was at this really cool place called the Levitt Shell. The second year, it sold out and the third year we went to two days. It was really fun, but it got to be a little more than we bargained for in terms of the amount of work it takes to put on a festival.

Eli Johnson – Moon River Music Festival
WIDER THAN A MILE: Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors bring a few friends to the stage during the 2018 Moon River Festival in Chattanooga, Tenn. This year

So, it’s more than “Hey, let’s put on a show!”

That’s basically what it was! My tour manager was the production manager the first two years for the whole festival.

So you came to a reckoning after three years?

My manager and his wife were partners in the endeavor. We decided to take a year off and have some conversations about what it looks like to keep doing it and pass on the baton. We wanted to still do the things that we love about it, like putting together the lineup. But all the parts of the festival, the port-a-potties, the food, the security – the stuff that we don’t do day in and day out, it felt like we were in over our heads. Thankfully we found a great partner in AC Entertainment, which promotes a lot of our regular touring.

We played Bonnaroo and Forecastle [both produced by AC Entertainment] and they were interested in partnering with us. We knew we needed a new location. We’d outgrown the spot we were in, and there were a lot of other music festivals there already. Chattanooga really has only one, the Riverbend Festival, which is a great city-produced festival. It was the spot for us to take this vision and grow it beyond being my reunion and make it a bigger musical event that I can help curate and let graduate beyond what I was capable of doing in-house.

We had to push the pause button for a couple of months of the year on everything else we do because we were putting on this festival. I’m a dad of three, my partner’s manager has multiple other bands that he represents and we were having to basically double and triple the amount of work that we were used to doing. Honestly, too, it wasn’t like we were at first dying to find a partner. AC had been friends of ours for a long time and had been expressing interest in being part of it and finally we just agreed we should take them up on this, they’re one of the best in the business and we’re really grateful for the partnership. They brought professionalism and a team that we are just over the moon about.

Does it still have that family reunion feel for you?

It does. There’s a couple of things that were really important to me. One was that I wanted to stay involved in curation of the lineup and thankfully AC has been great about that. There’s a lot of personal connection to the lineup as far as the family reunion aspect goes, for me. Every band, every act on the lineup, is one I really love. Even if I don’t know them personally, I’m a big fan of their music.

As for the actual festival itself, we only have two stages so no band is ever competing with another band for the audience. You can go to every single show on this lineup over the weekend, which is really important to me. The mainstage is finished playing and the next stage fires up. It goes on and on like that all day. You can’t make those choices.

Some worry that there’s a saturated festival market, yet it doesn’t seem to be affecting your show.

We hear from a lot of people that they don’t like going to music festivals anymore but they like coming to this one because it is relatively small, only two stages and only two days. It’s not an overwhelming experience where you park, and then an hour and a half later you finally get to the stage. Its right in the heart of downtown Chattanooga. I’d say for a majority of people who came last year, they could walk from wherever they were staying. Or they were able to park in one of the many spots downtown. We let people come in and out with their wristbands because there’s a lot of restaurants in the neighborhood and we want to be good neighbors while we’re there.

Chattanooga is such a central spot where it’s close to Atlanta, Birmingham, Knoxville, Nashville and there’s a lot of things to do at that time in the area. We’ve heard from a lot of people who’ve bought tickets who say, “We’ve always wanted to go to Chattanooga, this is a great reason to go.” Put all those things together – a great lineup, a great location, a great city – and that does a lot of the work for us.