Eaux Claires, the festival founded by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and the National’s Aaron Dessner in 2015, will stage its first edition in seven years on July 24-25 in Vernon’s hometown of Eau Claire, Wi.
The venue has yet to be announced, but speculation centers on Eau Claire’s 2,856-capacity Carson Park baseball stadium rather than Foster Farms, where the fest was held from 2015-2019.
The big question is whether Vernon will play at his own event, after vowing to take a long break from live performance while promoting his Grammy-nominated 2025 comeback album, SABLE, fABLE. He did return to the live stage last week as a surprise guitar player in friend and collaborator Dijon’s extended band during a New York gig at Terminal 5 and then on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Sources say he has been mulling the revival of Eaux Claires for months.
The debut Eaux Claires featured sets by Bon Iver, the National, Sturgill Simpson, Sylvan Esso, Spoon and Indigo Girls. In subsequent years, the event hosted a multi-artist Grateful Dead tribute, an extended performance by Vernon and Dessner’s Big Red Machine side project and, in 2017, one of the last U.S. festival appearances by John Prine, who died of COVID-19 in early 2020.
“We at Eaux Claires have been driven by the idea that our festival would encourage music-genre-walls to melt away,” Vernon said in 2015 before the first Eaux Claires. “That the barriers between the stage and the audience altered, and expression and experience put above all. We have put so much thought into who should collaborate at this festival, from musicians to actors, filmmakers to visual artists. We will all share and revel in this collision of artistic force while performing in the arms of our own Chippewa River Valley.”