FEATURE: Big Ears Festival 2025
Beth Gibbons
A BIG EAR WAX WEEKEND
I have this theory about parallel universes. Not some science fiction or quantum-physics kinda thing, but more like billions of concurrent histories, presents, and futures all happening at the same time. It’s basic Hinduism, really, sans theology. All individual experiences contain multitudes. Shared experiences unite parallel universes, creating mass consciousness, filtered through individual perspectives. Carl Sandburg’s poem Elephants Are Different to Different People conveys a similar idea delightfully if you’re not into transcendentalism.
EarWax Sessions, in their own way, are a microcosm of this theory. All these parallel universes, and the music and experiences that shaped them, orbiting each other, coexisting in their similarities and differences, creating new constellations of perspectives, all centered around a common love of sound. Intentionality has a lot to do with it, too, listening to others’ inspirations for their category choices as closely as your own. Multiply that by thousands, cram it all into a long weekend, and slam ‘em around dozens of venues in Knoxville, Tennessee, and that’s the macrocosm: the Big Ears Festival.
Lonnie Holley
Let that sink in for a sec. Hundreds of musicians. Scores of shows. Thousands of attendees, press, volunteer staff, venue and service industry workers. All these parallel universes are converging on one small Southern city, sharing intentional listening/performance sessions. And among them, there’s us. Four folks from different parts of the country (New Mexico, North Carolina, and New England) with shared histories going back decades, spending new quality/quantity time together, each experiencing the festival a little differently. We didn’t see every show together; sometimes, we saw the same show from opposite ends of the room. The only meal we all ate together was a (mandatory) late-night Waffle House run. But it wasn’t about uniformity, We Must All Do All; it was about taking in as much as we can, resting when needed, following what inspires us as individuals in a small pocket of a larger community, a new mass consciousness formed by listening/being together at a specific moment in a specific place.
That’s the beauty of Big Ears. Yes, it’s incredibly well curated; hats off to the organizers for putting on (and pulling off) another world-class event in a town so often overlooked. Yes, it plays right into much of the EarWax sensibilities: diverse, eclectic, surprising. But the thing I love most about the festival (2025 was my third, 2016 my first) isn’t how often I looked over my shoulder and saw an artist I witnessed onstage earlier in the day or the night before, getting their mind blown by the artist we’re both watching. That’s pretty cool, but it pales in comparison to sharing the electricity of your friend’s (or friends’) excitement about an artist, maybe one you have never heard before or haven’t heard in years. Hold special those spaces with an open mind that it might shape your universe and inspire future galaxies by all means necessary.
Big Thanks to Marcus for letting us stay in his kickass apartment, shout out to Josie for collaborating on radio coverage, word up to Zac from EWS who was also on the scene, and endless gratitude/respect to all the artists, organizers, and music lovers who performed and attended the festival, especially those who so graciously granted us radio nerds interviews and station IDs. Always a pleasure spending a weekend around your universes. Til next time…
— Donovan Quixote