15th Annual MeadowGrass Music Festival

We've brought back some friends who have played before to honor our 15th MeadowGrass Festival!

John Craigie & Friends + The Steel Wheels + Blitzen Trapper

Jeremy Garrett & The River Wild

Nefesh Mountain + Fantastic Cat + Michaela Anne

Winners of 2023 Telluride Bluegrass Festival & Rocky Grass Band Contests:

The Fretliners

Jacob Jolliff Band + Carolina Story + Heavy Diamond Ring + Grass It Up + Graham Good & The Painters + Gasoline Lollipops + Jeremy Facknitz & David Siegel + Patchwork Jack + John Bunzli + Look'ee Here +

A Carpenter's Daughter + School of Rock

MeadowGrass Music Festival is the premiere music festival to kick off summer in the Pikes Peak region. Always held over Friday, Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, MeadowGrass is known for attracting up-and-coming talent from the region and all over the world. Besides the amazing musicians, we have activities for kids (12 and under get in free with a paid adult), guided hikes, workshops, yoga, and late-night shows.

This year brings our 6th Annual MeadowGrass Beer Festival and 4th Annual Steve Harris Songwriter of the Year Contest. Amazing vendors offer a wide variety of food for all diets and retail items for all styles. The property, several hundred acres of forest, canyons and historic buildings, is a wonderful place to explore. All of this resides within 60 minutes of Denver and 30 minutes of downtown Colorado Springs! Please signup for our newsletter for news and coupons!

Get a taste of this years talent with the 2024 MeadowGrass Playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/598bjafTmjulXWVJpBadxx

As we receive bands bios you'll see them added below!

FAQs

How can I contact the organizer with any questions?

RMHMC09@gmail.com

FAQs

What are my transportation/parking options for getting to and from the event?

There is no public transporation to the event. We suggest carpooling. Our fabulous parking volunteers will guide you to a parking space when you arrive. You will be given a parking sticker upon arrival if you are camping.

What's the refund policy?

All tickets are final sale and cannot be exchanged or refunded. In the case of an event cancellation without a rescheduled date, a full refund will be automatically issued to each patron on the credit card used to purchase. By purchasing a ticket to this event, you agree to this purchase policy.

Do I have to bring my printed ticket to the event?

You must bring your printed ticket or electronic ticket to get in to the festival (not just the email confirmation letter).

Is it ok if the name on my ticket or registration doesn't match the person who attends?

Yes. Please note, tickets get scanned at the front gate and are good for one entry only.

John Craigie & Friends - Sunday Night

Much like community, music nourishes us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It also invites us to come together under the same roof and in a shared moment. In similar fashion, John Craigie rallies a closeness around music anchored by his expressive and stirring songcraft, emotionally charged vocals, lively soundscapes, and uncontainable spirit. The Portland, OR-based singer, songwriter, and producer invites everyone into this space on his 2024 full-length album, Pagan Church. Following tens of millions of streams, sold out shows everywhere, and praise from Rolling Stone and more, he continues to captivate.

“The music is always evolving and devolving with each new record,” he observes. “With my last album Mermaid Salt, I really wanted to explore the sound of isolation and solitude as everyone was heading inside. With this record, I wanted to record the sound of everyone coming back out.”

In order to capture that, he didn’t go about it alone…

Instead, he joined forces with some local friends. At the time, TK & The Holy Know-Nothings booked a slew of outdoor gigs in Portland and they invited Craigie to sit in for a handful of shows. The musicians instinctively identified an unspoken, yet seamless chemistry with each other. Joined by three of the five members, Craigie cut “Laurie Rolled Me a J” and kickstarted the process. With the full band in tow, they hunkered down in an old schoolhouse TK & The Holy Know-Nothings had converted into a de facto headquarters and studio, and recorded the eleven tracks on Pagan Church.

The Steel Wheels - Friday Night

Virginia-based folk-rock band The Steel Wheels have spent almost twenty years writing, recording, and touring, all the while constantly honing their evolving brand of American roots music. Additionally they are the founders and hosts of the Red Wing Roots Music Festival, a beloved staple of the Shenandoah Valley. Through the years, The Steel Wheels have drawn on both traditional form and modern sounds to capture the beauty in all of life’s varied trials and triumphs. Their new album, Sideways, which releases on February 9, 2024 via Big Ring Records, is a meditation on resilience and survival. Trent Wagler, the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter, penned many of the songs in response to loss, and the uncertainty that comes with facing what we can’t control.

Sideways begins with “Wait On You,” bounding out of the gates with a fervor carried by The Steel Wheels’ signature close harmonies and propulsive mountain energy. Through a seemingly simple story of the naivety of youth, the belief that we can skate by without being prepared for misfortune and the unexpected, the album kicks off with a kind of emboldening invitation in the face of an unavoidable truth. The world doesn’t wait on us—it’s our responsibility to shore ourselves up, to show up, to be ready to be a part of it all.

This year hit like a hurricane.

The winds they knocked me over

…

All the books you read were just a wish,

If you don’t show up, then you’re finished.

- (from “Wait on You”)

Jeremy Garrett Band - Friday Night

Jeremy Garrett is known as an innovative fiddle player, expressive singer and soul searching songwriter in the GRAMMY Award-winning band, The Infamous Stringdusters, who broke onto the national scene in 2007, scooping up 3 International Bluegrass Music Association awards, including Album and Song of the Year. Since then, the group has become a national ambassador for progressive bluegrass, playing to club, theater and festival audiences around the country.

To the fans of the Stringdusters Jeremy is known as “G-Grass” or “Freedom Cobra” for his dynamic stage presence. When he is not touring with The Infamous Stringdusters he turns his attention to his solo show, wowing listeners by using electronic effects to layer and loop multiple instruments and vocals, which he showcases on his latest album “Circles” released on Organic Records. Jeremy also performs in all-star line-ups ranging from funk music to traditional bluegrass.

Jeremy has a more intimate side as a songwriter, and has a broad catalog of originally crafted songs. He has contributed several songs to the Stringdusters, including the title track for their 2014 album “Let It Go”, winning first place in the Folk category for the 2014 USA Songwriting Competition. His songwriting collaborations include Darrell Scott, Oliver Wood (of The Wood Brothers), Jon Weisberger, Josh Shilling, Becky Buller and more.

Blitzen Trapper - Saturday Night

Singer-songwriters have been tackling existential questions about life and death since time immemorial… or at least the 1960s. But when it came to Blitzen Trapper’s newest album, Holy Smokes Future Jokes, front man Eric Earley looked beyond mere existence—or even the end of it—to contend with grander cosmic explorations: namely, the intermediate period between a person’s separate lives on earth, “and what it means to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth,” he explains. 

Weighty stuff, to say the least. But then again, Blitzen Trapper has never been the type of band to just skim the surface. Over the course of 20 years and ten full-length albums, the Portland, Oregon-hailing act, with singer, songwriter and guitarist Earley firmly at the helm, has crafted a singular catalog of songs—sometimes wrapped in impressionistic imagery and scruffy, singalong melodies (the fan favorite “Furr,” for just one example), and other times rendered in sharp-focus, needlepoint detail and imbued with driving, electrified rhythms (“Cadillac Road,” about a depressed and deserted mill town in the Oregon mountains where Earley’s father once worked, comes to mind here)— that celebrate the human experience in all its triumph and tragedy. 

Nefesh Mountain - Saturday Night

New York based Progressive Americana band Nefesh Mountain has been hailed as one of the formative boundary-pushing ensembles in roots music. The band's creators and dynamic husband and wife team of Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff have created a world and sound all their own; blurring the lines between Americana, Bluegrass, Folk, Jazz and Blues with a masterful hand as songwriters, instrumentalists and composers alike. The band, declared “A Powerhouse Unit” by Rolling Stone and "Introspective lyrics and world class musicianship” by American Songwriter, takes the listener on a deeply personal journey that embodies their own wild nature and unbridled free spirits, bridging compositional prowess and prolific songwriting with deft instrumentals and jams.

Since their formation nearly a decade ago, Nefesh Mountain has been proudly open and vocal about their background and heritage as Jewish Americans, and are among the first preeminent Americana / Bluegrass bands to infuse Jewish tradition and soul into the beautifully diverse tapestry of American roots music. For them the music is wholly American, freely expressing their own identities while at the same time addressing the hate, discrimination, anti-semitism and racism that still remains at large in America and the World today.The band has recorded and shared the stage with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Bryan Sutton, John Doyle, Noam Pikelny (Punch Brothers), Mark Schatz (Bèla Fleck, Nickel Creek), Mike Gordon (Phish) and Tony Trischka among others. The Troubadours along with their band continue to forge new paths in unknown territory, armed with Zasloff and Lindberg’s strong, smokey, and folksy vocals and Lindberg’s soulful and masterful skills on guitars and banjo alike.

Doni and Eric are on road year-round with their baby Willow and the Nefesh Mountain band; a collective of Bassists, drummers, and multi-instrumentalists including Thomas Cassell, Maddie Witler, Korey Brodsky, Dylan McCarthy, Ben Plotnick, Avery Merritt, Julian Pinelli, Dan Klingsberg, Noah Fishman, Erik Alvar among others

Yoga in historic Inglis Hall 9:00AM Saturday and Sunday at MeadowGrass. Brought to you by Root Center for Yoga and Sacred Studies. $10 suggested donation. After class you can grab breakfast from our vendors in the Meadow!

The Faricy Boys Kid Zone! Giant Bubbles from Milibo Art Theater, Crafts from Concrete Couch, the Hay Wagon, Kid Yoga, Art, and much more!

Plenty of camping in the Ponderosa Forest. Set up next to friends or find a secluded spot. Mornings are unforgettable at MeadowGrass.