My husband, our middle child, and I went to Shaky Knees Music Festival in Atlanta Georgia’s Piedmont Park this last weekend!
Hotel Selfie
We arrived late on Friday, but just in time to hear Snow Strippers in the background and catch Turnstile, which was one of my favorite sets of the weekend! They know how to lead a crowd, and I love when there’s a bunch of crowd surfers, which the singer specifically asked for mulitple times.
We wondered off to the merch booth to get a ton of shirts, a poster, and a bandana for the kiddo, which took us nearly 2 hours, going well into Friday’s headliners The Stroke‘s set, so we followed that with expensive festival food and a long walk back to the Marta public transit station.
Saturday we discovered we already had sore legs and blistered feet, but we were going into our most anticipated day of the weekend! We got up early enough for free hotel breakfast and a quick stop at a local coffee shop on the way to the park. The first show we caught was Elio Mei. What an incredible voice they have! Very unique fantasy style music with interesting lyrics to boot. This was one of the must see artists for our kiddo, and I can totally see why. Highly recommend checking out their music if you havent already!
We decided to eat early so we could set up in a good spot for Psychadelic Porn Crumpets, my husband’s personal favorite artist of the weekend. We quickly discovered that standing in a large crowd in peak sun of summer was too difficult for me, so we did end up setting up a blanket in the shade nearby, but the Crumpets put on such an amazing show that the distance hardly mattered! This was one of the best pits we saw.
Psychadelic Porn Crumpets from our blanket. Check out the snazzy pants!
After, we took the opportunity to grab some food, refill our hydration bags, and get up close for Pierce the Veil, our kid’s favorite band! They were SO excited to see them live, PtV was the whole reason they joined us for Shaky Knees to begin with…
And then the thunderstorm came.
In what was probably about 20 minutes the skies went from fully clear to a full downpour with lightning. The park was evactuated, and all sets were suspeneded until further notice. We and thousands of others walked to shelter or the Marta station and got fully soaked down to our socks. My family didn’t forsee the festival reopening so we decided to go back to the hotel, much to our kiddo’s dismay. We did our best to cheer them up with a nice dumpling dinner and boba tea ordered to our room. The festival DID end up reopeneing about 2 hours later, with the announcement that only the headliners, Twenty One Pilots, would be playing that evening. Although it would have been nice to see them, we had all showered and gotten into warm clothes and decided to call it an early night. We had seen a TON of people wearing red and yellow ductape as well as black paint on their hands and neck, which we looked up and discovered both to be something fans of TOP do for their shows, so I’m happy that they were given the opportunity to see them still. Social Media showed a pretty good turnout despite the weather and mud.
Althought PtV doesn’t currently have Georgia on their tour sites again, my husband and I will keep an eye out and be sure to bring the kiddo if they ever come back around.
Singer of Porch Light hyping up the crowd.
Sunday morning we sent our kiddo back to mom’s place, and my husband and I went off to day 3 of the festival. Sunday showed no signs of rain but blessed us with some overcast breezy weather in the morning.
We started with Porch Light‘s set, which was incredibly fun! The singer pictured above, Jackie Uhas, was so entertaining and she has an incredible voice. They’re smaller in popularity, but I can definately see them growing quickly. I’m lowkey obsessed with their song “Oxygen”, which I’ll put at the end of this blog post.
Next we mosied our way over to the main stage for Coheed and Cambria. I’m not the most familiar with their music, but we had a great time listening to them anyways. The fans were amazing for them. I once again found myself overheated in the crowd, so we left early to set up in the shade for OK GO.
The shade and sitting down felt amazing, but nothing compared to how amazingly the singer of OK GO treated the crowd at Shaky Knees. Sound issues caused the music to completely go out multiple times at the begining of their set, so singer Damian Kulash went out INTO the crowd to sing for them. The dedication was wonderful to see. We were seated pretty far from the stage and main crowd, so we couldn’t hear him at all, and decided to move over to the stage out next artist we wanted to see would be on.
We sat for a long while waiting for American Hi-Fi to start their set. It was nice to continue relaxing, cause I was starting to reach my southern summer heat limit.
The show was really fun! Becase we set up early we were on the barricade, my first time doing that in my festival going career. The lead singer, Stacy Jones, truly enjoys bringing his music to people, you can just tell. American Hi-Fi has a few great hits, “Geeks get the Girls”, “The Art of Losing”, and “Flavor of the Week” being my favorites. It was nice to see them live.
Overall, I had a really great time! I’m very frustrated by my sensitivity to the heat because of a medication I am on, and I need to get used to standing for hours on end, but the weekend still showed us a lot of fun times, expenisve but good food, and beautiful music.
Promised Porch Light song:
