Winnetka Music Festival returns for its 7th year to Chicago’s North Shore Father’s Day Weekend!

Winnetka Music festival returns to the North Shore with two days of music and interactive experiences for the whole family, alongside food, beer, wine, and great music. Over the course of the two days we’ll welcome 20+ artists across 4 stages throughout the festival grounds.

Artist Line-Up Schedule:

Friday, June 16, 2023:

MEET THE FRIDAY NIGHT ARTISTS

THE WALLFLOWERS

For the past 30 years, the Jakob Dylan-led act has stood as one of rock’s most dynamic and purposeful bands – a unit dedicated to and continually honing a sound that meshes timeless songwriting and storytelling with a hard-hitting and decidedly modern musical attack. That signature style has been present through the decades, baked into the grooves of smash hits like 1996’s Bringing Down the Horse as well as more recent and exploratory fare like 2012’s Glad All Over. Even so, in recent years, Dylan – the Wallflowers’ founding singer, songwriter and guitarist – has repeatedly stepped outside of his band, first with a pair of more acoustic and rootsy records, 2008’s Seeing Things and 2010’s Women + Country, and then with the 2018 film Echo in the Canyon and the accompanying soundtrack, which saw him collaborate with a host of artists classic and contemporary, from Neil Young and Eric Clapton to Beck and Fiona Apple. But while it’s been nine long years since we’ve heard from the group with whom he first made his mark, the Wallflowers are silent no more. And Dylan always knew they’d return. “The Wallflowers is much of my life’s work,” he says simply. Plus, he adds with a laugh, “It’s pretty hard to get a good band name, so if you have one, keep it.” Good band name aside, that life’s work continues with Exit Wounds, the brand-new Wallflowers studio offering. The collection marks the first new Wallflowers material since Glad All Over. And while the wait has been long, the much-anticipated record finds the band’s signature sound – lean, potent and eminently entrancing – intact, even as Dylan surrounds himself with a fresh cast of musicians.

THE DIP

On their Dualtone Records debut Sticking With It, Seattle-based seven piece The Dip deliver the kind of unbridled rhythm-and-blues that hits on every emotional level. Inciting everything from raw catharsis to heavy-hearted reckoning to wildly exuberant joy, the self-produced album marks a major creative breakthrough for the band. To that end, Sticking With It fully channels the vitality of the freewheeling live show that’s earned them an ardent following over the last decade, matching their sophisticated musicianship with a fantastically loose energy. When met with The Dip’s reflection on matters both timely (the crush of late capitalism, the glaring need for true community) and irrefutably timeless (the vast complexities of love and loss), the resulting body of work captures the mood of the current moment while offering immediate escape into a more elevated state of mind.

The third full-length from The Dip, Sticking With It came to life at their studio in Seattle’s Central District, a modest but meticulously outfitted space the band built entirely on their own. Although the album features a small number of guest musicians (including a Macedonia based string ensemble and background singers Vanessa Bryan, Dasha Chadwick, and Nic Jackson), The Dip crafted each extravagantly arranged track according to a self contained process that allowed for a rare depth of exploration and spontaneity.

HAILEY WHITTERS

On her 2020 breakthrough album The Dream, Hailey Whitters wrote about escaping her hometown of Shueyville, Iowa, to pursue stardom in Nashville. It was a fantasy record at first, full of far-off plans, hopes, and dreams. But it soon became Hailey’s reality — she signed a label deal with Big Loud/Songs & Daughters, went on tour with Luke Combs and Midland, and made her first of many appearances on the Grand Ole Opry.

The Dream and its deluxe reissue Living the Dream earned her critical acclaim from media outlets as varied as The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Garden & Gun, and Stereogum, which ranked it the best country album of the year. Hailey racked up 75 million global artist streams, was named the inaugural Opry NextStage Artist of 2021, and was nominated for Breakthrough Video of the Year at the CMT Music Awards. Remarkably, she also became a Grammy-nominated songwriter for “A Beautiful Noise,” her collaboration with artists like Brandi Carlile, Alicia Keys, and Brandy Clark.

In the midst of that whirlwind, Hailey found herself reconnecting with her Midwestern roots. Shueyville was always in the back of her mind and the memories she made there — getting her first kiss from a boy who tasted like wintergreen tobacco; racing her friends through the cornfields; eating Sunday supper with her big family — started to shape her writing. Over the past two years, she channeled those memories into her highly anticipated new album, Raised.

MAGGIE ROSE

Joslyn & The Sweet Compression

Abraham Alexander

RUEN BROTHERS

Midnight Canyon

BUY FRIDAY TICKETS >>

Saturday, June 17, 2023:

MEET THE SATURDAY NIGHT ARTISTS

MICHAEL FRANTI & SPEARHEAD

Michael Franti is a globally recognized musician, activist, hotel owner (Soulshine Bali) and award-winning filmmaker revered for his high-energy live shows, inspiring music, devotion to health and wellness, worldwide philanthropic efforts and the power of optimism. Throughout his multi-decade career, Franti has earned three Billboard No. 1’s with triumphantly hopeful hits “Sound of Sunshine,” “Say Hey (I Love You)” and “I Got You,” as well as six Top 30 Hot AC singles, 10 Top 25 AAA Singles and three Billboard Top 5 Rock Albums. Spearhead’s 12th studio album Follow Your Heart, released in June 2022 and debuted at No. 2 on the iTunes Pop Chart behind Harry Styles.

Franti resides in Bali when he is not on tour and owns Soulshine Bali, a 32-room top-rated boutique hotel located in Ubud, Bali that focuses on joy through wellness and music, offering unique retreat opportunities and accommodations, along with special events and celebrations. Soulshine Bali continues to expand and grow with recent renovations, including a second restaurant, day club, panoramic yoga shala, and a new spa. In January 2019, Franti released his self-directed documentary Stay Human, which won an array of awards at film festivals worldwide and influenced his writing for his album Stay Human Vol. II (Thirty Tigers), which debuted at No. 1 on both the Americana and Independent Album charts and received critical acclaim from USA Today, Billboard, Associated Press and Paste. Franti’s Stay Human podcast presented by PACT is nearing its 100th episode and features creatives from all walks of life, with new episodes available each week.

Franti continues to foster community both on and off stage with a wish granting non-profit, Do It For The Love, founded by Michael and his wife, Sara. Do It For The Love brings those with life threatening illnesses, veterans, and children with severe challenges to concerts worldwide, fulfilling over 3,300 wishes and touching the lives of over 12,000 people to date.

NEAL FRANCIS

On his new album In Plain Sight, Neal Francis offers up a body of work both strangely enchanted and painfully self-aware, unfolding in songs sparked from Greek myths and frenzied dreams and late-night drives in the depths of summer delirium. True to its charmed complexity, the singer/songwriter/pianist’s second full-length came to life over the course of a tumultuous year spent living in a possibly haunted church in Chicago. The result: a portrait of profound upheaval and weary resilience, presented in a kaleidoscopic sound that’s endlessly absorbing.

The follow-up to Francis’s 2019 debut Changes—a New Orleans-R&B-leaning effort that landed on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of KCRW, KEXP, and The Current, and saw him hailed as “the reincarnation of Allen Toussaint” by BBC Radio 6—In Plain Sight was written and recorded almost entirely at the church, a now-defunct congregation called St. Peter’s UCC. Despite not identifying as religious, Francis took a music-ministry job at the church in 2017 at the suggestion of a friend. After breaking up with his longtime girlfriend while on tour in fall 2019, he returned to his hometown and found himself with no place to stay, then headed to St. Peter’s and asked to move into the parsonage. Mixed by Grammy Award-winner Dave Fridmann (HAIM, Spoon, The Flaming Lips, Tame Impala), In Plain Sight finds Francis again joining forces with Changes producer and analog obsessive Sergio Rios (a guitarist/engineer known for his work with CeeLo Green and Alicia Keys). Like its predecessor, the album spotlights Francis’s refined yet free-spirited performance on piano, an instrument he took up at the age of four. With a prodigy-like gift for piano, Francis sat in with a dozen different blues acts in Chicago clubs as a teenager, and helmed a widely beloved instrumental funk band called The Heard before going solo. Along with earning lavish acclaim (including a glowing review from Bob Lefsetz, who declared: “THIS IS THE FUTURE OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS!”), Changes led to such triumphs as performing live on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” sharing the stage with members of The Meters at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and touring with such acts as Lee Fields & The Expressions and Black Pumas.

In November 2022 Francis released the EP Sentimental Garbage (ATO Records) which includes a number of standout tracks recorded during the original album sessions at St. Peter’s. “Sentimental Garbage was the working title of our last LP,” Francis says, “which includes the track of the same name. We ended up calling that record In Plain Sight while removing the title track from the sequence. I knew this was my last chance to slap ‘Sentimental Garbage’ on a record jacket, the thought of which always brought me great joy. It also works because this record is compiled of bittersweet scraps.”

MADISON CUNNINGHAM

Madison Cunningham is a 26-year-old GRAMMY award-winning artist and songwriter known for her “wonderfully tangled imagery and cutting self-awareness” (NPR). As a guitarist, Madison has pushed the boundaries of a conventional singer-songwriter as her “guitar work is both classic and wildly emotive, and her soaring vocals are pristine and inspired” (Consequence). Madison first picked up a guitar at age seven, and by age twelve was singing and performing alongside her five siblings in church. In her teenage years, she met Tyler Chester who would later go on to be a close collaborator and producer of several of Madison’s projects including Who Are You Now (2019) which Atwood Magazine described as “a guitar-driven record, full of twisting, meticulously arranged parts and interlocking melodies. It’s almost labyrinthine; you could get lost in her swirling words.”

Cunningham’s latest effort, Revealer, won the GRAMMY for ‘Best Folk Album.’ Revealer finds her working once again with producer Tyler Chester along with Mike Elizondo and Tucker Martine. Written and recorded over all states of the pandemic, Madison says, “To me, ‘revealer’ is the binding theme of the album. The hand that slowly chips away at the mirror in which you see yourself and the world and replaces it with the reflection that is most true.” The album is “full of intricate musicianship, alongside forthright observations” (All Music), intimations and hard truths—a self-portrait of a young artist who is full of doubt and uncertainty yet bursting with exciting ideas about music and life.

BRISCOE

Brigitte Calls Me Baby

Lowdown Brass Band

Alejandro Escovedo

Toronzo Cannon

Abby Holliday

Hollyy

Funkadesi

Oshima Brothers

Wyatt Waddell

Johanna Samuels

KIELY CONNELL

LILLA SOL

JOSH SPINNER

ASHER ALCANTARA

BUY SATURDAY TICKETS >>

Dates: June 16 & 17, 2023

Hours:

FRIDAY:

Doors: 4:00pm
Music: 5:00pm - 10:30pm

SATURDAY:

Doors: 12:00pm
Music: 1:00pm - 10:30pm

Location: 800 Elm Street, Winnetka, IL 60093

Click Here to BUY TICKETS

Click Here for more information.