Photo Credit: Steve Barrass
This year’s Four Chord Music Festival was certainly one for the history books, as far as music festivals go! With this year being the festival’s 10th Anniversary and breaking through into a new venue, this year was nothing short of energy mixed with with a bit of chaos (in a good way).
Let us set the scene for you: its 11 am, temperatures have spiked to 94 degrees, and you’re stepping off of a school bus onto the grounds of the historical Carrie Furnace in Pittsburgh, PA. This is a much different feeling from the previous years of Double-A baseball stadiums and end-of-summer festival dates. This was a summer music festival, if there ever was one, with slight reminder of the good old days we once called Warped Tour.
The humidity was high, the heat was treacherous, and the lack of shade didn’t help with what felt like was going to be an early night. With that said, never doubt the team that Drusky Entertainment and Four Chord Music Festival put together to help with the weather conditions, as much as possible. The stages were capped at the ends with oversized fans and misters, security had what seemed like an endless supply of water for those toughing out the pit, and water refill stations that helped with hydration throughout the weekend!
The festival kicked off on Saturday morning with bands like Mallory Run, Cliffdiver, and hometown heroes Eternal Boy (who we would like to mention are about to embark on a US tour with the legends in Bowling For Soup). As the day proceeded, the crowd began to grow at a rapid rate, as bands such as Four Year Strong and Four Chord alumni State Champs took the stage.
It is about this time that Senses Fail is taking the stage and the sun is now giving concertgoers a break from the heat, although they are heating up the place themselves, as we are only one band away from Saturday night’s headliners known as A Day to Remember.
The Story So Far was the last band to take the stage before A Day to Remember graced the crowd with a legendary performance that spanned their entire 20 year catalog. The performance came with a handful of surprises, some planned and some not. Opening up with a heavier track “Sticks & Bricks”, A Day to Remember carried on with a few songs from their most popular album, What Separates Me From You, before rolling into “Paranoia.” This is where the surprises begin. “Paranoia” holds the band’s first stage effects of their set with an insane amount of smoke canons… that MAY have caused a power outage throughout the entire festival grounds. As a lifelong fan of ADTR, there was nothing more exhilarating than seeing the band I’ve anticipated seeing for many years play so hard the power went out. But I can only imagine what was going through the band and promoter’s heads when this happened.
A Day to Remember’s Jeremy McKinnon made some jokes during the outage and had some fun with it while the staff rushed to get things back in order. It should be noted that the festival did have emergency lights on the crowd from the stage to ensure that no one was in danger. It wasn’t but maybe 5-10 minutes before the venue was lit back up and the show was resumed! About half way through the set came the next surprise (and yes this one was planned) when the band dusted off an old cover of Kelly Clarkson’s Since You’ve Been Gone. This was a cover that helped put the band on the map in the pop-punk scene many years ago and hadn’t been played in quite some time. I’ll keep the rest of the set a bit of a surprise, since this is the show they are currently touring as part of their Least Anticipated Album Tour. The night ended with A Day to Remember’s most popular hit “The Downfall Of Us All”.
Through the massive clouds of dust, excruciating heat, and unforgiving sun, Four Chord Music Festival’s 10th Anniversary couldn’t have done a better job at taking all of us “Elder Emos” back to the days of Warped Tour, where you would start moshing at 11 am and run on nothing but Monster Energy for 12 hours.
It’s safe to say that we will return to see what Rishi Bahl and the rest of the Four Chord team have in store for us next year, as we anticipate the bar to be raised even higher!
For more coverage of this year’s Four Chord Music Festival, be sure to head over to our social media accounts where you can catch all of the photos and many setlists from your favorite bands at the festival!
Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to attend day 2 of the festival. Day 2 of the festival included performances from upcoming artists, such as Taylor Acorn, and legendary staples in the music scene, Motion City Soundtrack and headliners All American Rejects.