JamFest • October 2026

High Water 2027 Lineup Drops, Trey Anastasio Band Hits the Road, String Cheese Launches Their Fall Run, David Byrne Releases New Music, Phoebe Bridgers Rules the Charts, and Bob Weir Live at the Capitol Theatre Tonight

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High Water Festival 2027 • Jack Johnson & Mt. Joy Headline • April 17–18, North Charleston, SC

The High Water Festival has been one of the most thoughtfully curated boutique events on the American festival calendar since its founding, and the 2027 lineup announcement confirms that its organizers have not lost their touch for assembling a bill that rewards listeners who want discovery alongside the names they already love. The festival returns to Riverfront Park in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 17 and 18, 2027, a waterfront setting on the banks of the Cooper River that provides the kind of natural beauty and open-air intimacy that the music on this bill deserves.

Jack Johnson headlines Saturday, April 17, and his presence at the top of the bill is entirely appropriate for a festival whose identity has always been built around the idea that the best outdoor music experiences combine genuine craft with a relaxed, community-focused atmosphere. Johnson is one of the most reliably excellent live performers in the AAA and acoustic rock world, an artist whose laid-back surf-rock sensibility translates beautifully to outdoor settings and whose catalog runs deep enough that any given setlist is likely to contain songs people love alongside songs that remind them why they started following this music in the first place. Death Cab for Cutie, The Revivalists, Ole 60, and Mat Kearney fill out a Saturday bill that covers the full range of what the High Water audience responds to best.

Mt. Joy takes the Sunday headline slot on April 18, and the choice is a strong one. The Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based band has been building one of the most devoted followings in contemporary indie folk and roots rock for several years, developing a sound that sits comfortably at the intersection of classic singer-songwriter craft and modern production sensibility, and their live performances have developed a warmth and a communal energy that makes them an ideal festival closer. Rainbow Kitten Surprise, The Head and the Heart, local favorites Congress the Band, and an appearance by Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard with his music project round out a Sunday bill that manages to be both eclectic and coherent in the way that only the best-curated festival days achieve.

The structure of the festival itself is worth highlighting because it is genuinely unusual and genuinely generous to its audience: 20 acts spread across two alternating stages with zero overlapping sets. That design means every person at High Water can see every act they want to see without being forced to choose, which is an experience that most festivals of any size make impossible and that High Water has built its reputation on making standard. The result is a festival where the act of attending feels genuinely complete rather than perpetually compromised by the math of simultaneous stages.

Beyond the stages, the festival grounds will host a curated culinary village called The Refuge, highlighting regional Southern eateries, craft breweries, and cocktail bars right on the banks of the Cooper River, adding the specific pleasure of great regional food and drink to an already exceptional music weekend. High Water has been voted a top global festival under 30,000 attendance, and the combination of the waterfront setting, the no-overlap scheduling, and the culinary program makes that recognition feel entirely earned.

The remaining bill includes Mo Lowda and the Humble, Hazlett, West 22nd, GoldFord, Ax and the Hatchetmen, and Alyssa Grace, a collection of indie and roots acts that fills out the weekend with the kind of discovery programming that keeps festival regulars coming back. On the ticketing side, a presale goes live Thursday October 15 at 10 AM ET with discounted two-day general admission pricing available during a strict one-hour window for those who sign up on the official High Water Festival website. Public on-sale for remaining single-day GA, GA Plus, VIP, and Platinum packages follows immediately at 11 AM ET.

Trey Anastasio Band • Fall Tour 2026 • November 10–21

The Trey Anastasio Band’s fall 2026 tour is a seven-date East Coast run scheduled for November 10 through November 21, and the itinerary has generated sustained excitement in the jam community for several reasons that compound on each other as you look at the full picture. This is not simply a TAB tour with a few interesting venue choices. It is a carefully assembled sequence of shows that moves through historic theaters, an iconic rock club, a landmark grand reopening, and concludes with a two-night arena run that carries a genuine charitable mission and a collaborative partnership that makes the final two nights something categorically different from everything that precedes them.

The tour opens November 10 at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, a room with the kind of historic New England character that TAB shows respond to particularly well, before moving to Palace Theatre in Albany, New York on November 12. The Albany date carries its own significance: it marks the first time TAB has performed in that city since 2013, which is a long enough absence that the community there has been anticipating this date since the announcement. The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York on November 16 is one of the most beloved rooms in the entire Northeastern live music ecosystem, a venue whose history with Phish and the Grateful Dead and the full range of American improvisational music gives every performance inside it a specific weight and context that more modern spaces simply cannot replicate.

The most significant single date on the non-arena portion of the tour is November 13 at Loew’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City, New Jersey, where TAB will headline the official grand reopening night of the newly restored movie palace. The Loew’s Jersey is one of the most architecturally extraordinary theaters in the tristate area, a 1929 movie palace with an ornate interior that has survived decades of neglect and restoration efforts, and the fact that Trey Anastasio Band has been chosen as the act to inaugurate its modern era as a live music venue is both a statement about TAB’s stature and an extraordinary opportunity for anyone who can get to Jersey City on November 13. The Anthem in Washington D.C. on November 14 rounds out the theater portion of the tour in one of the most consistently excellent mid-sized venues on the East Coast.

The tour concludes November 20 and 21 at the DCU Center Arena in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the specific nature of the event changes entirely. For these two nights, Trey Anastasio and Billy Strings perform together for the complete show, fully backed by the Trey Anastasio Band, in benefit concerts where one hundred percent of proceeds go directly to the Divided Sky Foundation, the nonprofit organization Anastasio founded that operates a managed addiction recovery center in Vermont providing accessible and affordable care. The Worcester shows are not part of Billy Strings’ standard fall streaming package, which means the in-person experience is the only complete experience available. For anyone within driving distance of Central Massachusetts who can be in that arena on either night, the combination of the musical collaboration and the charitable mission gives these shows a significance that extends well beyond the already extraordinary billing.

The TAB lineup for the full tour features Dezron Douglas on bass, Russ Lawton on drums, Ray Paczkowski on keys, Cyro Baptista on percussion, and Natalie Cressman on trombone and vocals. This is among the most musically sophisticated configurations that Anastasio has assembled for a touring band, and the breadth of influence that each musician brings to the ensemble gives the TAB live experience a richness and a variety that pure rock band configurations cannot match.

The String Cheese Incident • Just Keep Spinning Fall Tour • October 28 – December 12

The String Cheese Incident has named their fall 2026 tour Just Keep Spinning, which is either a statement about their creative vitality at this stage of a multi-decade career or a simple declaration that the music and the road are the things that make sense and they intend to keep doing both for as long as they possibly can. Probably both. The tour follows their annual appearance at Suwannee Hulaween in Florida and launches with a series of East Coast dates in late October before pushing into the Midwest and concluding with an extended California run in December, covering the full national footprint that String Cheese has maintained across their entire career.

The tour opens October 28 at the Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre within the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey, and the venue choice is notable. Red Bank is one of those mid-sized New Jersey towns with a live music culture that punches significantly above its weight, and the Count Basie Center is one of the most acoustically beautiful theater venues in the state. Doors open at 6 PM and the show begins at 7:15 PM. For a veteran jam band of String Cheese’s stature to open a national fall tour in an intimate theater rather than a large amphitheater or arena is a deliberate and musically meaningful choice, one that signals the band’s continued commitment to the close relationship between performer and audience that has defined their best shows across three decades.

The tour then delivers one of its most anticipated moments with a two-night Halloween weekend run at the historic Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York on October 30 and 31. The Capitol Theatre and String Cheese Incident have a relationship built over years of performances in that room, and the combination of Halloween and the Cap and SCI’s genre-blurring bluegrass-rock-funk fusion is as reliable a formula for an extraordinary live music experience as the jam world consistently produces. The immersive live production that String Cheese brings to major theatrical venues takes on an additional dimension during Halloween shows, when the band’s commitment to the full sensory experience of a great concert naturally incorporates the visual and theatrical elements that the holiday invites.

After the New York dates, the tour extends through Providence, Rhode Island, before heading into the Midwest with stops in Detroit, Chesterfield, Missouri, and Cincinnati. The tour concludes with a six-city California stretch that represents one of the most appealing sequences on the full itinerary: multi-night engagements at Oakland’s Fox Theater on December 4 and 5, before the tour closes at The Sound in Del Mar, California on December 11 and 12. String Cheese in California in December, playing multi-night runs in rooms that know them well and audiences that have been following them for years, is about as reliable a bet for an extraordinary live music experience as the fall touring calendar offers.

David Byrne • “Let Me Sell You a Dream” • New Track for MUSK Documentary

David Byrne has released new music, which is always worth paying attention to regardless of context, but the specific context here is particularly interesting. The former Talking Heads frontman has teamed up with Academy Award-nominated film composer Daniel Pemberton to release “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” a brand-new original track out on Matador Records written specifically for MUSK, director Alex Gibney’s highly anticipated documentary about Elon Musk opening in theaters nationwide this Friday, October 16. The collaboration brings together two musicians whose careers have intersected consistently with the most ambitious and intellectually serious corner of popular and cinematic music, and the resulting track has been picked up heavily by Adult Album Alternative radio formats for exactly the reason that AAA formats exist: it is rhythmically sophisticated, lyrically pointed, and made by an artist with a long history of using music to say things about the world that prose alone cannot fully express.

Musically the song leans into Byrne’s classic quirky art-pop and avant-funk sensibilities, reminiscent of his late-era Talking Heads work, blended with Pemberton’s sharp and modern cinematic orchestration. Pemberton’s credits include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Steve Jobs, two films whose musical scores demonstrate exactly the kind of tonal intelligence and rhythmic invention that makes him the right collaborator for a project that needs to balance dark satire with the fast-paced high-stakes energy of the contemporary tech empire it is documenting. The combination of Byrne’s specific lyrical sensibility with Pemberton’s cinematic architecture produces a track that works as a standalone piece of music and as a thematic statement about what the film is actually about.

The title, “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” positions the song as a commentary on tech-futurism and the selling of grand utopian visions, the magnetic pull of charismatic modern figures who pitch revolutionary concepts to the public in language that borrows the emotional register of genuine idealism while serving the practical interests of enormous commercial enterprise. Byrne has spent his entire career making music that examines American culture with the simultaneous affection and skepticism of someone who has been inside it long enough to understand both its genuine vitality and its persistent capacity for self-deception, and “Let Me Sell You a Dream” continues that tradition in a form calibrated to the specific cultural moment of 2026.

Alex Gibney is the right director for the MUSK documentary, and the choice of Byrne as its musical anchor is consistent with Gibney’s long record of assembling the best available creative collaborators for his most ambitious projects. Gibney’s investigative documentaries, which include Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, have established him as one of the most serious and effective practitioners of the form working today, and his approach to MUSK is expected to bring the same rigor and the same commitment to understanding systems of power in their full complexity rather than simply as moral tales. Byrne’s involvement continues his long-standing relationship with cinematic music that extends from his historic Oscar win for The Last Emperor through the acclaimed Broadway-to-HBO project American Utopia, and “Let Me Sell You a Dream” fits naturally into that body of work.

AAA Radio Charts • Phoebe Bridgers at #1 • Heavy Rotation This Week

Phoebe Bridgers has claimed the number one position on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart this week with “Lost Boys,” a placement that reflects the sustained critical and commercial momentum she has maintained since the release of Punisher in 2020 established her as one of the most significant singer-songwriters of her generation. Bridgers operates in a specific register of confessional indie folk that balances emotional directness with enough sonic ambition and production sophistication to keep the music from settling into the comfortable familiarity that the AAA format can sometimes encourage, and “Lost Boys” continues that approach in a track that earns its chart position through genuine artistic merit rather than format calculation.

Below Bridgers at number one, the current national Triple-A airplay charts show significant traction for several format staples that reflect the range of what Adult Alternative radio does best when it is operating at its highest level. Cage the Elephant holds strong at number two with “Beaches in Tennessee,” a track that demonstrates the band’s continued ability to develop their sound across albums while retaining the urgent, hook-driven energy that made them one of the most reliably excellent acts in the alternative rock world. Death Cab for Cutie pushes into the top three with “Stone Over Water,” continuing the chart presence that the band has maintained this year alongside their number one run with “Riptides.” Noah Kahan rounds out the top five with “Doors” and The Revivalists appear with “Heart Stop,” two acts that represent the generational range of the AAA format at its most inclusive and its most genuinely reflective of what the listening audience actually wants to hear.

In public radio news, WUMB-FM, the premier Massachusetts-based Adult Album Alternative outlet, has officially picked up the syndication rights for New Hampshire Public Radio’s weekly live music series, Live From the Word Barn. The syndication deal expands the acoustic and indie singer-songwriter program’s footprint across more than 275 cities throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, representing a significant expansion of the regional AAA programming ecosystem and a meaningful new platform for the acoustic and roots music that the Word Barn series has always prioritized.

New Releases • Tributes • Rising Artists

An all-star tribute album honoring The Felice Brothers has been assembled quietly and is now confirmed, featuring brand-new exclusive covers from Brandon Flowers of The Killers, Deer Tick, Hiss Golden Messenger, Willie Watson, and Mikaela Davis. The Felice Brothers have occupied a specific and beloved corner of the American roots and folk world for nearly two decades, and the roster of artists who have contributed to this tribute is a direct reflection of the breadth and depth of their influence within the community. Brandon Flowers bringing his sensibility to Felice Brothers material is the kind of unexpected combination that tribute albums produce at their best, the moment when a covering artist’s own musical identity interacts with the source material in a way that illuminates both simultaneously.

Steve Martin has teamed up with bluegrass royalty Alison Brown, Del McCoury, and Dan Tyminski to record a bluegrass rendition of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” that is both musically serious and genuinely delightful, which is the only combination worth achieving for a project of this kind. Martin has been a serious and accomplished banjo player for decades, and his collaborations with the bluegrass world have always operated from a place of genuine musical commitment rather than celebrity novelty. The combination of his banjo with Alison Brown’s virtuosity and Del McCoury’s foundational authority in the tradition produces a recording that honors both the source material and the form it has been translated into.

Reggae-fusion artist Matisyahu has collaborated with Nova Music Festival survivor Yuval Raphael on a new inspirational track ahead of his major November 14 appearance at Florida’s Sunset Cove Amphitheater alongside Wiz Khalifa and Steel Pulse. The collaboration between Matisyahu and Raphael connects two artists whose music has always been rooted in questions of faith, resilience, and community, and the specific context of Raphael’s experience as a Nova festival survivor gives the collaboration a weight and a meaning that the music itself carries without requiring explanation.

Sisters Natalie and Brittany Haas, the latter known for her work with Punch Brothers and Hawktail, have released their acclaimed new roots-classical record North Node, featuring contributions from mandolin icon Sam Bush. The record sits at the intersection of acoustic virtuosity and compositional ambition that defines the best work being made in the progressive acoustic world, and the addition of Sam Bush’s mandolin voice to the sisters’ string-centered arrangements produces a record that honors the deep tradition of American acoustic music while finding something genuinely new to say inside it.

A newly published data tracking report from Grateful Web outlines a distinct shifting of the guard in the broader jam scene, identifying a wave of jamtronica and progressive fusion outfits that are experiencing the highest surge in digital streaming and club ticket sales this autumn. Space Bacon from Brooklyn, Solar Circuit from Philadelphia, and Indiana electronic-rockers Dizgo represent a generation of bands that has absorbed the full history of the genre and is now generating their own audience rather than waiting for the legacy acts to clear space on the calendar. The report connects their growth to scheduling reductions from older stadium-tier touring bands and identifies the current moment as a genuine opportunity for independent acts with deep improvisational roots and strong digital presence to establish themselves with a fanbase that is actively looking for the next great live music experience.

Tonight on JamFest • Live Nuggets • Bob Weir at the Capitol Theatre • October 16, 2016

Bob Weir’s October birthdays at the Capitol Theatre have quietly become one of those sacred fall rituals for Deadheads, nights when the music leans inward, the stories linger longer, and the connection between artist and audience feels almost conversational rather than performative. These shows occupy a specific place in the Capitol Theatre’s long relationship with the Grateful Dead world, carrying the intimacy and the accumulated history of a venue that has hosted more significant moments in that tradition than almost any other room outside of San Francisco.

While many listings mistakenly tag Bob Weir’s Capitol Theatre birthday show as a 2017 performance, the concert that continues to circulate most widely among collectors and tape traders, and the one that fans who were there still describe as one of the most emotionally resonant nights they have experienced in that room, actually took place on October 16, 2016. That night was not only a celebration of Weir turning 69 but one of the most significant stops on his Campfire Tour, a touring configuration that blended acoustic intimacy with rich Americana textures and the deep Grateful Dead heritage that Weir has always carried with a combination of reverence and restless creativity. The two-set experience that night felt both personal and historic in a way that the best Weir performances always do, catching an artist who has been living inside this music for fifty years and who still finds new things to say inside it.

Tonight on JamFest, that legendary evening takes center stage once again. Live Nuggets presents a very special handpicked broadcast airing the full concert in its entirety, giving listeners the chance to relive one of Weir’s most heartfelt Capitol Theatre performances from start to finish. Live Nuggets airs every Tuesday night at 9 PM EST on JamFest, streaming live at JamFestRadio.com and available on TuneIn. Tonight’s selection is as good a reason as any to make sure you are tuned in.

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