The Living Roots Music Festival, Fredericton’s celebration of curated music and unlikely venues, is returning for their third iteration. Last year’s festival saw forty-five acts from all over the world perform across the city in some unexpected places: breweries, pubs, cafes, bars, a barbershop and a church. This year they aim to do it all over again and have announced their first headliners for 2018.
“The idea is to have multiple musicians/acts playing multiple shows at different venues over three days, focusing on acoustic, roots and folk music but not limited to,” says Living Roots organizer Eddie Young. “[We’ll be] pairing up local acts with touring musicians and promoting local businesses.”
“We are focused on bringing in great artists that are not household names and we encourage people to look theses artists up, seek out the show, introduce a friend to them, hang out with the artist. We try to encourage the acts to stay in town for the duration of the festival, and take in our city.”
“We will have some returning acts from last year that just fell in love with Fredericton and the people here and that asked to come back right away. You will of course see a lot of our local favourites as well, and we will be pairing these up for some great collaborations.”
Today the festival announced the first three headliners for 2018 along with a limited sale of early bird tickets.
Irish Mythen, the Irish-born, Prince Edward Island-dwelling but generally globetrotting Canadian folk artist, will be performing at Grimross Brewing Co. Friday, May 25th.
Bad Strangers’ Cassidy and Cory from Vancouver will be pairing their haunting autoharp, guitar and harmonies to bring you everything from “truthful ballads to gritty room-shakers.” The duo will be performing Thursday, May 24th, and Friday, May 25th of the festival.
Outside I’m A Giant from Hull, Quebec will be performing all three days of Living Roots. The ambient folk-trio aim to carry on their homage “to the balladry of Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, steering towards scintillating instrumental arrangements.”
The third annual Living Roots Music Festival takes place May 24th -26th, 2018. A very limited number of early bird passes ($60) will go on sale Friday, January 19th at 10:00 a.m. online via Etixnow.com and at the ticket kiosk located at Fredericton’s Grimross and Graystone breweries. Regular passes and tickets go on sale Friday, March 23rd at 10:00 a.m.