The Lollapalooza 2017 lineup has been announced!

The 2017 Lollapalooza lineup is out and it’s not bad at all. For some reason, I was expecting a very subpar lineup, and to be honest, I had considered skipping this year in favor of trying out a festival that I have never been to (FYFEST? ACL? perhaps Liverpool Psych Fest? any of these are still possible if I can scrape up the funds), but in the end, I still ended going through the adrenaline rush of trying to snag and succeeding in getting a 4 day wristband. So, when the bands were announced yesterday, I was actually pretty excited.

Thursday gives us Muse, Lorde, Cage the Elephant, and Wiz Khalifa (?) as headliners with Porter Robinson, Liam Gallagher, Kaytranada, Temples, and Atlas Genius playing during the day.

Friday is stacked with goodness from The Killers, Blink 182, DJ Snake, and Run The Jewels, with Crystal Castles, Little Dragon, Cloud Nothings, and Saint Jhn. This is probably my favorite lineup of the weekend.

Saturday has Chicago’s own Chance the Rapper, The xx, Alt-J, and The Head and The Heart along with Kaskade, Warpaint (I’d love to be on that side stage thing during their set!), Highly Suspect, and Boston representing with 2 acts…indie poppers Lady Pills and rapper Michael Christmas.

Sunday wraps up the festival weekend with Arcade Fire, Justice, Big Sean, and The Shins, with Rae Sremmurd, Tove Lo, Joey Bada$$, Charli XCX, and one of my guilty pleasures, Grace Mitchell.

Of course, Lollapalooza weekend wouldn’t be complete without hitting up some daytime parties (which there was a lack of last year) as well as the nighttime parties such as Culture Collide and Floodfest, or DJ sets at the Virgin Hotels (where I’m staying at again this year because that place was a-m-a-z-i-n-g!) which are always my favorite part of Lolla weekend. It’s going to be a long 4 1/2 month wait until I’m in Chicago. Did anyone else score tickets? Going solo as I am? Let’s meet up and hang for a set or two!

Floodfest Party at the Virgin Hotels Chicago – Broods, DJ Golden Touch, Viet Cong, Win Butler 7-30-2015

After getting about 2 1/2 hours of sleep, I was up and ready to hop on the airport shuttle from Woburn to Logan Airport for an obscenely early flight to Chicago and Lollapalooza 2015. The downside to arriving soo early is that your room isn’t ready when you arrive at the hotel, which I’m fine with since it gives me a chance to find some breakfast. After a couple of hours, I got the call that my room was ready and was able to check into the Hard Rock Hotel. I have started to have a love/hate relationship with the Hard Rock Hotel in the last couple of years. The nearly $14 per day for wifi is one of those reasons to hate it and I seemed to get a bit of an attitude during check in. Maybe that’s why my room was soo cheap this year. Anyway, I’m here to have fun!

Broods

The room was very small at the daytime party

The daytime Floodfest show, which took place at the Virgin Hotels Chicago, featured Coasts and Broods could only be described as a “clusterfuck”. This was something advertised as being open to the public, but as the doorman explained to us, it was for industry insiders only, but promised he’ll try to get us in. Ugh! After standing in a line that dwindled from about 15 people to 3, they let us in just in time to see literally the last 30 seconds of Broods’ set. I will give the doorman tons of credit, because he tried like hell to get us in. One good thing that came out of it is that I made a new friend from Brooklyn, who was the only other person left standing in line. So, we just chilled in a cool little outdoor area, had a beer, then left.

Jesse Rogg aka Golden Touch

The night time show was a much more pleasant experience. We were let right in and went to the 3rd floor of the Virgin Hotel. This was a really small room and it wasn’t crowded at all. I went over to the bar and ordered the most expensive rum and coke ever…and not on purpose…yikes! People seemed to mingle about as Jesse Rogg aka Golden Touch was DJ’ing for a bit.

Viet Cong

As much as I love a large music festival, sometimes I prefer these smaller intimate shows for something like this and Viet Cong did not disappoint. With their loud and noisy post rock sound, Viet Cong seemed to be having a great time playing this really small room with the crowd enjoying it just as much as the band. This was seriously one of the coolest things about this weekend.

In between sets, I was contacted on Twitter by someone from Vnue, which was one of the sponsors of this show. I ended up meeting with two people from Vnue, who were really cool guys and I ended up with a t-shirt, sunglasses, and some pins.

Win Butler

DJ Windows 98 aka Arcade Fire’s Win Butler was up next to do a DJ set. I was surprised at how crazy tall he is. I’m not really much of a fan of Arcade Fire other than a couple of songs here and there, but his DJ set was pretty eclectic, spinning and manipulating everything from Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” to Rob Base’s “It Takes Two“ to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It“. Win Butler seemed pretty cool too, taking pictures and talking with the crowd all night.

Afterwards, I ran into my new friend from earlier and we chatted about music and festivals. It’s always cool to meet new people with similar interests. I made my way back to the Hard Rock for some much needed sleep and to get ready to take on the first day of Lollapalooza.