“Wellness Plus Music Equals Better Lives”: How Park City Song Summit Is Putting Artists First
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The post “Wellness Plus Music Equals Better Lives”: How Park City Song Summit Is Putting Artists First appeared first on Consequence.
“I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I know that there’s a need,” says founder Ben Anderson of his new music event, Park City Song Summit.
Returning September 7th-9th for its second year in the serene mountain town of Park City, Utah (also home to the Sundance Film Festival), the Song Summit is filling a massive hole in the festival landscape. (Enter to win tickets here, or get 20% off all ticketed events by using the code SUMMIT here.) The event isn’t just about the unique lineup featuring Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Grandmaster Flash, Brittney Spencer, Matisyahu, Anders Osborne, Devon Gilfillian, and more, but the artists themselves: Anyone with an eye on or hand in the music industry is more aware than ever of how the constant motion can impact the well-being of these professionals. Being on the road for a living requires leaving family and home for weeks on end, rarely taking breaks between taking stages, often putting the show ahead of all else.
And that goes beyond the performers; lighting techs, roadies, tour managers are all people — real, human people — who come to their jobs carrying all the baggage of a person in 2023. Park City Song Summit acknowledges this oft neglected reality by giving professionals a space to not just do their jobs, but take a beat to recenter, engage in valuable conversations, and cross the barrier between stage and audience with wellness activities and intimate panel discussions. The idea is that by taking care of these hardworking humans, we actually take care of the very music we love.
“If we as promoters and producers don’t start to do something that sees [artists] as whole humans, and that the entire ecosystem of live music touring from the bus driver to the guitar tech to the families that are back at home that are left when these artists go on the road [are whole humans], if we don’t start taking better care of them, more and more of them are either going to end up in the ground, not playing music, or certainly at a bare minimum, not bringing their best and most beautiful art form forward,” says Anderson.
Despite his humble caution, if last year’s inaugural incarnation is any indication, PCSS is indeed working.
“What struck me about last year at Park City was the intention to center on community,” says blues musician and poet Adia Victoria, one of a handful of 2022 attendees returning this year for more panels — called labs at PCSS — and performances. “It was more collaborative, it was more inclusive. It was an opportunity over the few days that we were there to share ideas, to have feedback, to be in communication with listeners.”
The Song Summit is not an arrive-play-leave event; artists and their teams are invited to spend the entire time on site, taking part in labs one day, performing the next, and hiking the mountains or taking sound baths in between it all. Victoria recalls how speaking about her music is informed by the history of blues in front of people she would later see walking through the lodge in her PJs or in the crowd at her set gave a sense of “accountability… an ease… a sense of humor” to her performance.
“There’s a little bit of context behind your songs,” she explains. “There was more space to talk and tell the stories behind the songs. I always look forward to the opportunity when I’m able to do that and lean into more of my storyteller side. I think that’s just a completely different experience than seeing me perform at a club or theater with my full band where I’m just performing a setlist.”
Victoria is expanding on that context with two labs at this year’s Song Summit. The first is called Femme Roots of the Blues, featuring fellow blues musician Celisse and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom. The trio will bring “the Southern Black porch experience of blues women who created this school of thought, created the blues from our front porch” to the “intimacy of Park City” for a deep conversation about the genre’s roots.
The other, BluesMovement, will see Victoria, Ciona Rouse, Caroline Randall Williams, and Celisse exploring the “philosophy” and “poetics of the blues” through movements choreographed by Gabriel Terry. “So you’re going to be able to hear the blues performed, spoken, and then also see the blues and movement in the body,” says Victoria. “So it encapsulates all that the blues has meant to me.”
Park City Song Summit’s labs are designed to do exactly this: Reveal the true depth and healing power of music through wide-ranging, personal discussion. Anderson calls the panels the event’s “bread and butter,” noting he’d “100% prefer” an artist come do a lab without a performance rather than the other way around.
“Once people see that Song Summit is about these intimate conversations where audience and artists really have an amazing chemistry and that there’s a vulnerability that happens there and they can really dig deep and let out some really powerful emotions and thoughts and activism, they will remember that more than they will whether or not they performed the same set five times in the Intermountain Region that year, right?”
That human-first approach is what attracted Joy Oladokun to PCSS. Originally booked to perform when the event was set to debut in 2020, she’ll finally journey to Song Summit this September.
“It’s rare for something to even be set up in this way,” she says. “I think there are a lot of festivals that try to integrate some of the conversation pieces or the wellness pieces as they get older and they grow… But I think the benefit that Song Summit has is that it from the outset has been like, ‘How do we make something that is as much about everything else as it is about the music?'”
As a Nashville-based artist who has carefully built a team — from label on down — that’s attuned to the well-being of everyone around them, a festival that considers “the people who give us art as more than just content creators but actual humans with passions” speaks to a vital part of herself. “As a leader, as a human, I just try to be realistic about how hard all of this work is. Whether you’re my day-to-day manager or an assistant, or you’re a band member or driver, you are choosing to be away from home or to use your time to work on stuff that basically just matters to me, you know? I just try to be mindful of that and do simple shit like say thank you.”
Oladokun also talks about taking care of the body to take care of the mind, whether it’s a round of ginger shots before the set or stretching to start the day. Victoria’s BluesMovement reflects this, as does Oladokun’s own lab, Embodiment, Meditation & Movement with “author, guru, coach” Ruthie Lindsay. Oladokun was struck by “the way [Lindsay] moves and the way she thought about the tie between our brain and our body.
“One of the biggest things that has been helpful for me this year… [has been] little things like stretching and walking, and taking my socks off and walking barefoot in relatively clean grass — the little things I didn’t realize could make me feel better or make the emotions manageable… And oddly enough, some of that has to do with movement and even how that plays into shows, like really letting my emotions come through the way I play guitar or the way I sing, the way I interact with the band.”
That’s exactly the type of “whole person” talk that sparked Anderson’s Park City Song Summit mission. He could go on for hours about all the labs — music students from Havana playing with Cimafunk; Grandmaster Flash, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, and Public Enemy’s Chuck D celebrating 50 years of hip-hop; Ramblin’ Jack Elliott talking about teaching Bob Dylan guitar; a Stevie Wonder tribute; exploring the roots of Black and Latinx music with Rissi Palmer and Enrique Chi — but it all comes down to wanting to take care of the individuals who make all this music possible.
“It’s a holistic approach of awareness first of all,” he says. “Resources come behind that, and then a paradigm shift in the industry to focus more on this hopefully comes behind that.”
In that way, Park City Song Summit is for those who give a damn about how we can continue to “dance in the sand” with the artists we love — and thus need to cherish: “People who are open to learning more about artists and therefore themselves. People who like to have one-of-a-kind experiences that will never happen again that year and may never happen again. And folks who love to connect to this healing platform of music — wellness plus music equals better lives.”
This story was created in partnership with Park City Song Summit. Use the code SUMMIT for 20% off tickets here, or enter to win three-day passes below.
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“Wellness Plus Music Equals Better Lives”: How Park City Song Summit Is Putting Artists First
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