BONUS TRACKS: FreshGrass | North Adams Announces Lineup for 2025 and More Roots Music News
Hilary Saunders
Posted On March 21, 2025
The FreshGrass Foundation, No Depression‘s nonprofit publisher, has announced the lineup for its 2025 edition of FreshGrass | North Adams — its flagship, three-day music festival in the Berkshires. This year’s event, which takes place September 19-21 at MASS MoCA, features headliners like bluegrass jam band Greensky Bluegrass, Cuban roots dynamos Cimafunk, soul singer Lee Fields, country crooners Kitchen Dwellers, and mandolin maestra Sierra Hull (whose new album A Tip Toe High Wire just came out last week).
The lineup for this 15th anniversary event also includes many other No Depression favorites. Country singer Jaime Wyatt, who was the Spotlight artist in November 2023, multi-genre legend Swamp Dogg, and contemporary old-time musicians Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves are all slated to play as well. And as the longest tenured FreshGrass performer, banjo icon and entrepreneur Alison Brown returns to the stage, while her label, Compass Records, will have a pop-up shop on the MASS MoCA campus. More lineup additions will be announced in the coming months.
The FreshGrass Festival also includes FreshScores, silent films set to original, live-performed music; FreshGrass commissions, which include world premieres of new works; and FreshGrass awards, grants awarded to one unsigned banjoist, guitarist, fiddler, and band that include cash prizes and recording time at Compass Records. The winner of the band competition will also receive a slot to perform at next year’s FreshGrass Festival. Last year’s winner, the Boston-based Catfish in the Sky, will play the Main Stage in September.
Weekend passes for FreshGrass | North Adams are available now and cost $169 for adults, $129 for students, $59 for children 7–16
years old, and are free for children 5 and under. Learn more and buy tickets via MASS MoCA.
In other news around the roots music community, David Moss of The Brother Brothers has a GoFundMe set up to help pay for unexpected medical expenses after a freak, near-drowning incident while the band was on tour in Australia earlier this year.
Bluegrass and folk musicians Nefesh Mountain is crowdfunding for a documentary about their band’s story and the journey of sharing hope and fighting against discrimination through music.
Honduran and Garifuna folk musician, politician, and activist Aurelio Martínez passed away this week in an airplane accident. He was one of No Depression‘s biggest highlights from FreshGrass| Bentonville 2024. Read more from the AP and watch his 2015 Tiny Desk Concert below.
WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO
Here’s a sampling of the songs, albums, bands, and sounds No Depression staffers have been into this week:
Liz Longley – New Life
Bats – “Downtown sucks you can’t park anymore”
Angel Olsen – “Big Time”
Hayden Butler – “The Night I Painted the Sky”
Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles – “Stranger” (from Sparkhawk’s forthcoming album, With Trampled by Turtles, due out on May 30, via Sub Pop Records)
