Ashley for the Arts (Arcadia, WI), 2023-08-12

In July 2023, the news hit me like a punch in the gut: Walk the Moon were announcing their "hibernation." The band I loved, that had lifted me in hard times and cultivated the soundtrack I lived by, were going on indefinite hiatus. Any dreams I had of the guys getting a second wind of popularity with Heights, of getting to follow them on an imminent tour, were dashed on the rocks.

But it wasn't quite over. Though WTM weren't on tour, they still had a handful of outdoor festival venues booked for performances through to the end of the year. One of these was Ashley for the Arts, a three-day event in western Wisconsin sponsored by Ashley Furniture Industries.

The fact that they were playing at a glorified furniture-company picnic (and weren't even the headliner, at that) was a sad commentary on how the band's stature had shrunk since the stadium-filling days of 2015. But it was a no-brainer to go: Ashley's home base of Arcadia was just seven hours from Thunder Bay, and this would probably be my last chance to see Walk the Moon together.

• The drive there was emotional. In 2015, I took a road trip from Madison, Wisconsin to Winnipeg, Manitoba. While listening to local radio on U.S. 61 southeast of St. Paul, I heard Walk the Moon for the first time...and my life was changed then and there. On this trip, I drove down the very same stretch of road. If this was going to be the end of Walk the Moon, it only felt right to let my journey end in the exact same place it began.
• The drive there was also positively frightening. For the latter half of the drive, I was literally chased down the road by a cumulonimbus cloud unleashing a pitch-dark fury of rain and thunder in its wake...as the radio crackled with reports of golf ball-sized hail, and urges for anyone outside to find cover immediately. At one point, the storm nearly caught up to me and I had to steer around tree branches blown into the road. And I was driving a rental car that I couldn't afford to get a scratch or dent on!!

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Arrival & soundcheck

I checked into a hotel in Winona. Early the next morning the storm cleared, and I eagerly made the short trek to Arcadia.

• I have a tendency to worry on trips, but I needn't have worried about parking: The festival had space galore. 99% of the cars I saw had Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Iowa licence plates. I did not see a single other Ontario-registered vehicle. I was an outsider...again.
• One narrowly-averted disaster happened when I sat down on the shuttle bus, and realized that my ticket had literally fallen out of my pocket. I leaped out, and found it on the ground five metres away.
• After feasting on overpriced food, I approached the main stage just after lunch to secure a front-and-centre vantage point. I ran into a couple other Walk the Moon fans while I was there (who brought face paint, though they neglected to share it), and sat down in the sun for the long haul.
• A few minutes later, soundchecks began, and I caught my first glimpse of Eli Maiman and Sean Waugaman. Multiple artists were performing on the main stage, and the next two hours were divided between with each act taking a few minutes to test its equipment. Since he and his bandmates were engaged, I didn't have a chance to speak to Nick, unlike in Nashville.
• Walk the Moon started their soundcheck by playing a few bars of Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life." The irony of this was absolutely palpable, given how one band had basically replaced the other in my repertoire over the last 20 years!

Click on any image to enlarge:

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Concert

At 5:00 sharp, Walk the Moon went on stage...and the crowd went wild!

• Prior to WTM's entrance, a short interview was played on the video wall. The band expressed their satisfaction of how playing in Arcadia represented a return to their midwestern roots, and their frustration with how the excellent Heights album had been left in an "underrated" lurch.
• Since 2020, Walk the Moon's bassist position has been something of a wildcard for the band. In Nashville they played with Joey Howard, a touring member of Paramore. This time around, the reins were held by Australian musician Lucky West.
• As they had in Nashville, the band started their set with the post-2016 perseverance anthem of "One Foot."
• Walk the Moon played a full-length set, complete with favourites such as "Sidekick" and "Headphones" that hadn't made the cut the year before. I was thrilled!!!
• The biggest treat of the show was the fact that the band pulled out the stops to bring along a special guest from afar: Jesse Clegg, the multi-talented musician from South Africa. Clegg sang backup on "Fire in Your House," the world music-influenced masterpiece of the Heights album...and he hit it out of the park!
• Another unexpected treat was an emotional rendition of the Killers' 2004 classic "All These Things That I've Done." It had been a few years since the Killers were last on my radar, and it was great to have the kick-off to a rediscovery of their material.
• At one point between songs, Eli Maiman mentioned to the crowd that the day happened to his parents' 45th wedding anniversary...and his parents were in attendance in the crowd, just like I was!
• The band had so much enthusiasm and energy in their performance that it was unreal! Nowhere was this more apparent than in the stage moves of Nicholas Petricca, who tirelessly danced, pranced, strutted, and shook for a full hour and a half...even when he was playing the synthesizer.
• An amusing accident happened during "Shut Up and Dance," when Nicholas got so animated that the microphone actually flew out of his hand! The crowd carried the tune for him until he could recover this piece of equipment, and the song ended perfectly.
• Throughout the entire performance, I was standing front and centre in the crowd. The band's logo was tattooed on my right arm, I stood a full foot taller than everyone else, and I must have looked like I was in pure bliss.
• By coincidence, Nicholas had painted his fingernails exactly the same way I did.
• Par for the course, Walk the Moon closed their set with "Anna Sun." Midsong, Nicholas leaped from the stage to congregate with fans along the front row and central aisle. "Anna Sun" is a wistful song even in the best of times...and since this was the last song in the last WTM show that most of the fans in attendance would experience, it goes without saying that it was a very emotional and tear-jerking experience. The band took a bow of gratitude at the end, then exited the stage. The show was done.

Then...

• As I stood by the barrier reflecting on the amazing experience I had just seen and heard, a stagehand approached out of the blue and put a wad of paper into my hand. I unfolded it...and lo and behold, it was a copy of the setlist from the performance. Out of the corner of my eye, a red speck tumbled from the folds to the ground. I picked it up...and it was Eli Maiman's red guitar pick. A gift...from the band, to me! It made my year. ♥
• I was featured in the official 2023 Ashley for the Arts promotional video! (CW: Facebook)

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Other artists

Yes, there was more to see than just Walk the Moon alone! Four artists went on the main stage during the event, headlined by OneRepublic...who I was also eager for.

• First on stage was RaeLynn, a Texas-born musician with a keen melodic sensibility and a distinctive visual style...let down by bristling lyrics and commentary.
• Walk the Moon were followed by Tyler Hubbard, Georgia-born vocalist who achieved fame in Florida Georgia Line until the band cleaved under political lines in tandem with the states of its members. Despite occasionally delving into country cliches, Hubbard's performance turned out to be a pleasant surprise...with genre-blending material that reminded me of the country music I listened to as a kid before 9/11 rendered the genre insufferable.
• The headliner of the festival was OneRepublic, who put on a major production complete with an onstage piano, string section, and light show. Frontman Ryan Tedder broke into a mid-set "concert within a concert" by covering a selection of songs he had written for other artists. "Counting Stars" was the encore. Though the performance was enjoyable, it couldn't help but feel like a letdown after Walk the Moon.

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The bad, and the ugly...

Wonderful though WTM were, the progressive messaging of their music felt at odds with the festival itself, which contained a series of off-putting and unwelcoming moments:

• The entrance to Ashley for the Arts was guarded by an airport-grade security setup complete with metal detectors and pat-downs, a symptom of America's fucked-up gun "culture" and Wisconsin's insane concealed-carry laws (that extremists in my own family were responsible for instigating.)
• As if to reinforce the point, I saw a disturbing number of gun-themed T-shirts in evidence in the crowd, worn by white people embracing the image of deadly weaponry as a tool to intimidate minority groups.
• There was a prominently-displayed rental trailer near the main stage emblazoned with the "thin blue line," the white-supremacist symbol used by defenders of racialized police violence (as well as insurrectionist terrorists on January 6th).
• RaeLynn, the first musician on main stage, pandered to the crowd by performing a series of songs whose lyrics were defensive of Christianity and conservative small towns. For the record, I grew up in a small town whose population is 944, and I remember it as the place where the populace deified a right-wing cop who turned out to be a child molester. RaeLynn comes from a city of 83,701, next door to the fourth-biggest city in the country...meaning that the schtick is all an act.
• Between songs, said artist also more or less bragged about her intention to forcibly indoctrinate her daughter into Christianity.
• Before Walk the Moon were allowed to go on stage, none other than the President of Ashley trotted out an old white guy to sing a "beautiful rendition" of "God Bless the U.S.A."...the cloying mid-1980s jingoistic cheese-fest that the right has used as a rallying anthem for American theocracy and war crimes in every decade of my life. A few belligerents then tried to break into a chant of "USA! USA!", which made me think I had fallen through a portal to hell and was back in Mountaineer Boys' State again.
• This trainwreck was then followed by a recitation of the national anthem of a country I had consciously emigrated from...and every person in the crowd was vocally ordered to take off their hat. I obliged, because I was in an extremely visible location and was concerned that some of the people who surrounded me would get violent if I didn't. I've always recoiled from displays of forced "patriotism" at civic events...and after living in Canada where you just don't see stuff like this, it was an unpleasant jolt. It seemed obvious that the organizers had U.S. tunnel vision, and never once reflected on how excluding the ceremonies felt to visitors from outside the country.
• And speaking of violent and frightening people...throughout the concert, I was standing three metres from an old white man whose shirt and hat were emblazoned with far-right conspiracy-theorist slogans. Two of the women at my side saw him, pointed at him, and were positively horrified. The man looked bored throughout Walk the Moon's performance, and visibly disgusted by their queer empowerment anthem "Different Colors." I got back at him by periodically flashing my rainbow helix tattoo in his direction.
• During Walk the Moon's performance, personnel physically removed a fan from the standing area by pulling her over the security barrier and excising her from the audience. This may have been done in the name of safety (the fan had crouched on the ground to operate her phone, setting herself up for a risk of being trampled)...but since the act happened so suddenly, forcefully, and without obvious warning, I was disturbed.
• During the festival, I saw a few people with articles of clothing bearing the name or likeness of a certain indicted orange-haired fascist. One of them took advantage of an audience camera pan to flash themselves during OneRepublic's set, killing the mood during the final minutes of the performance. What I saw was a drop in the bucket of over 35,000 people in attendance...but any amount of this sentiment is too much.

As glad as I was to have taken the trip, I was glad to be back on Canadian soil when it was over.

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What burns in the fire, we'll find again in the ashes.

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©2023 Andrew Turnbull.
Last update 21 August 2023.
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