Every great music festival produces a handful of performances that outgrow the stage they happened on, moments when a band connects so completely with an audience that the entire venue seems to become part of the song. One of those moments happened on July 28, 2013, when a young Denver group called The Lumineers walked out at the legendary Newport Folk Festival and delivered a full length set that, in hindsight, feels like a mission statement for an entire folk revival. Tonight, that performance gets its due. All Things Considered Live airs at seven o’clock, followed at nine by six commercial free hours of NewGrass Radio, and together the two programs frame a night built entirely around the roots side of American music, the acoustic instruments, the front porch harmonies, and the current generation of pickers determined to carry all of it forward.

The Lumineers, Then and Now

Tonight’s All Things Considered Live broadcast revisits a Lumineers set that has only grown in stature with time. Newport in the summer of 2013 was already sold out and buzzing before the band ever picked up an instrument, and what followed was the kind of communal, stomping, wordless-chorus experience that Newport itself was built to produce decades earlier. It is easy to forget, listening back now, that “Ho Hey” and “Stubborn Love” were still relatively new songs at that point. The crowd sang them anyway, at full volume, the way people now sing along to catalogue defining hits.

That trajectory has not slowed down. The Lumineers spent this year riding the momentum of Automatic, their fifth studio album and, by the band’s own account, its most raw and personal collection yet, written by co founders Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites after two decades of partnership and, more recently, fatherhood. The record has translated into a genuinely massive live footprint, headlining stadiums and amphitheaters across the Automatic World Tour and closing out the summer with a marquee, stand alone appearance at Louis Armstrong Stadium, where the band officially launched the 2026 US Open’s Fan Week festivities in front of a packed house. For a group that started out playing hundred capacity rooms in Denver after leaving a cutthroat New York music scene behind, opening a Grand Slam tennis tournament is its own kind of full circle moment.

True to their reputation for pacing a career rather than chasing every date on the calendar, The Lumineers have pulled back from the road as autumn begins, with no new fall tour dates currently on the books. It is a quiet stretch that makes tonight’s replay feel especially well timed, offering listeners a chance to hear exactly where that enormous stadium sized sound started, stripped down to voices, an acoustic guitar, and a room full of strangers singing along like they had known the words their whole lives.

NewGrass Radio and Bluegrass’s New Golden Age

At nine, the broadcast shifts into NewGrass Radio, six straight hours of bluegrass designed to work equally well for longtime devotees and listeners hearing the genre’s modern wing for the first time. The timing lines up with a moment that genre insiders are increasingly comfortable calling a genuine golden age. Billy Strings remains the artist selling out arenas and pulling bluegrass into rooms it rarely occupied a decade ago, but the broader picture heading into the fall festival season is a scene expanding in every direction at once. Younger string bands such as Mountain Grass Unit are seeing exponential jumps in ticket demand and social reach, while California’s AJ Lee and Blue Summit have gone from festival parking lot pickers to headlining the Ryman Auditorium and launching their own debut festival, built around the same Bay Area lineage that runs back through Garcia and Grisman.

Running alongside that rise is a wave of genre blurring that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago. Molly Tuttle, fresh off recent Americana Award recognition, has spent this year folding Grateful Dead inspired psychedelia and pop hooks directly into traditional picking, while mandolinist Sierra Hull has been touring alongside funk guitarist Cory Wong, and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves has guested with Dave Matthews Band, a group that jamgrass writers now half jokingly describe as having been a bluegrass adjacent band all along. It is a scene where the old rules about what counts as bluegrass are dissolving in real time, and NewGrass Radio’s six hour window exists specifically to trace that lineage from its founders through to whichever new string band is about to break out next.

What’s Moving on the Airplay Charts

Zoom out to the broader radio landscape and the same roots leaning sensibility is showing up at the top of the charts. Late September’s airplay rankings are led by Phoebe Bridgers’ “Lost Boys,” holding firmly at number one, with Cage the Elephant’s “Beaches in Tennessee” close behind at number two and Death Cab for Cutie’s “Stone Over Water” rounding out the top three. Just beneath them, Noah Kahan’s “Doors” is climbing quickly following a high profile live season premiere, and further down the list, The Revivalists and Alabama Shakes are both seeing real momentum, the latter enjoying a notable radio resurgence behind its new single, “I Feel Hope Coming.” Taken together, the chart is a fairly clean snapshot of where mainstream radio and roots leaning songwriting currently intersect, and it is exactly the kind of overlap tonight’s programming block is built to explore.

The Jam Scene’s Biggest Week: Philanthropy, Fall Tours, and a Cosmic Detour

Earlier this month, the jam and Americana worlds converged for a genuinely significant night of philanthropy. Trey Anastasio, Dave Matthews, and Chris Stapleton each performed solo acoustic sets at the T.J. Martell Foundation’s annual New York Honors Gala, an evening built around honoring Red Light Management founder Coran Capshaw, the longtime manager behind all three artists’ careers. The gala went on to raise more than three million dollars for cancer research, its most successful outing in over two decades, a reminder of just how tightly interwoven the business and charitable sides of this scene have become.

Dave Matthews Band, for its part, is far from finished with 2026. After a headlining slot at Oceans Calling Festival in Ocean City, Maryland was ultimately disrupted by severe coastal weather and beach erosion that made completing the festival build unsafe, the band is now gearing up for a compact but high profile fall run, opening November fourth at Madison, Wisconsin’s Kohl Center before working through Nashville, Chicago, Providence, and Baltimore, and closing with a two night stand at Madison Square Garden. It is a tour that arrives on the heels of the band’s continued environmental partnership work, part of a now seven year commitment to reforestation that has become as central to the DMB story as the music itself.

Elsewhere in the jam world, a considerably more left field pairing is generating its own kind of buzz. Keyboardist John Medeski, best known for his work with Medeski Martin and Wood, has teamed up with Phish drummer Jon Fishman and a rotating cast of unannounced guests for an intimate run of shows dedicated entirely to the cosmic jazz catalogue of Sun Ra, staged at one of downtown Manhattan’s most storied venues. It is the kind of genre crossing curiosity that this same jam and roots community has always rewarded, and it fits neatly alongside everything else in tonight’s lineup, proof that the line between folk, bluegrass, jazz, and jam has never really been a line at all.

Tune In Tonight

All Things Considered Live begins at seven o’clock with the full Lumineers Newport Folk Festival broadcast, followed at nine by six commercial free hours of NewGrass Radio, running deep into the night for bluegrass fans old and new. Both programs stream live through JamFest Radio, making tonight one of the more ambitious back to back broadcasts the station has put together this season, and a fitting soundtrack for the changing of the season itself.