It’s Not Just A Trend, Mom: Sad Summer’s Mike Marquis Talks Being Ahead Of The Curve

Backstage during the final date on Warped Tour’s last full cross-country run at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, on July 21, 2018, CAA agent Mike Marquis said to his friends that there had to be a way for the show to continue. Throughout his career, Marquis always had several bands playing Warped Tour, which began in 1995.

“We were all talking about what we were going to do every other summer now that the Warped Tour is gone,” Marquis says. “That was where the idea was born.”
Marquis teamed up with Tim Kirch and Josh Terry to start the traveling festival Sad Summer, which launched in 2019 and is now celebrating its fifth anniversary. This year’s lineup — concentrated on pop-punk, emo and alternative rock — features Mayday Parade and The Maine as headliners, with performances from The Wonder Years, We The Kings, Real Friends, Knuckle Puck, The Summer Set, Hot Milk, Diva Bleach, Daisy Grenade and Like Roses.

Sad Summer kicks off its 2024 season at The Backyard in Sacramento, California, on July 11. The festival will make stops in Atlanta, Philadelphia and more before wrapping up at The Chrysalis at Merriweather Park in Columbia, Maryland, on Aug. 9. “Finding the right venues was really important,” Marquis says of first putting together the festival. “Finding spaces that would appropriately host the kind of show we were trying to put on. Because it’s a little different. There were a lot of parking lots on the Warped Tour and fields. It wasn’t all proper amphitheaters. So we put a lot of energy into trying to figure out how to do something that felt down-to-earth and more like a community event. We built every show individually.”

This year, the show will take place in venues including The Mission Ballroom (indoor and outdoors) in Denver, The Salt Shed (indoors and outdoors) in Chicago and The Rooftop at Pier 17, among others. This year, they won’t be making a stop in Texas. Marquis says the extreme weather there led to fans passing out due to heat exhaustion, and so they made the decision to avoid the area during its hottest months.

“There’s always been certain states and cities that have been prime places for this audience, like Orange County, New Jersey and Western Massachusetts,” Marquis says. “We started with the places we knew the show could be great. Then we tried to build a routing that was economical, where we didn’t do so many shows that there’d be a bunch that were harder or not as well attended, but enough we could make the budget work and make it feel like a tour instead of just a couple pop-up festivals.”

Marquis notes that they’ve been on the emo wave long before its post-COVID resurgence that includes When We Were Young festival and the newly-minted Summer School touring festival. He says it’s beneficial to have more players in the space, as it means they can find more fans to attend their events, but it also creates challenges with more competition.

“The traffic is a challenge navigating all that and cutting through the competition with authenticity,” he says. “What we started is very real, with people who have their ear to the ground on what matters … [with] bands that fans actually like instead of, ‘How do we make a bunch of money doing a big emo festival?’ Because emo’s hot right now. A lot of these artists will get paid more to do some random event that’s branded as an emo event, but it’s not a good experience.