Music, sunshine, and bourbon, what more could a woman want?

And Louisville, Kentucky’s Bourbon and Beyond provided barrels of all three. This four-day festival (September 19-22) spread over the Highland Festival Grounds at the Kentucky Expo Center gives you 117 bands performing across five stages, over two dozen distilleries offering their best riff on a whiskey cocktail (mostly bourbon) plus two tasting rooms, all under a beating sun that is relentless til sundown. There’s a workshop stage featuring bourbon tastings, cooking demos, interviews, and hourly Monster line dancing all afternoon.

The sprawling complex was overwhelming as you entered; highway exits were closed, and it wasn’t clear how to park and get into the festival to this B&B rookie, but once you were in, the layout is expansive yet manageable, providing lots of space to get close to the performers, relax with friends in the back, sip cocktails, grab some food, or get in your selfies with the art installations. An easy festival entry meant plenty of time to set up a blanket, grab a whiskey, wander, and get a lay of the land before the music started. But once Taylor Acorn began to be on the Barrel stage, you had to move up to the stage to check out this up-and-comer. So, after just a few hours, I knew this festival was going to be in my regular festival lineup

So what was good?

You can’t beat the headliners (and co-headliners), a proper mix of the state of today’s and yesterday’s rock (without going nostalgia).  Thursday, Sting’s excellent set closed out the night on the Oak stage (one of the two alternating side-by-side main stages) with a 90-minute set. He strung together a 17-song group of The Police and solo Sting hits, somehow taking unusual rhythms and vocal inflections and tweaking them to great effect.

He had the crowd from the first “Message in a Bottle notes.” Ninety minutes is not long enough to get his catalog in. While the songs felt rushed together without a second’s pause between them while he was performing, Sting stretched them out with his usual Day-O-style call-and-response phrases, which the crowd happily and loudly sang back.

Mid-set, as he performed the more mellow new single “I Wrote Your Name” and “Shape of My Heart”, the sound bleed from rocker Koe Wetzel on the other stage was distracting, but once he and his two band members launched back into “Walking On The Moon”, they beat it back. When he returned for an encore, he quipped “I don’t know what song you want to hear!” immediately launching into “Roxanne”, the answer. He was a replacement for Neil Young who had to cancel, but he was worthy of the task. 

(c) Glide Magazine By Nancy Lasher & Lisa Benne