Bonnaroo Band of the Day: Mt. Joy

As we’ve been doing for the past several years now, we’re making it our mission to help you get acquainted with many of our favorites acts from from Bonnaroo‘s impressive 2017 lineup. As we dig through the entire schedule, we’ll highlight a spread of performers spanning across genres and stages, big and small, new and old, to bring you some of the most interesting, lesser-known, or most highly-reccomened among this year’s crop of artists. Though we’ll be jumping around, we’re loosely working our way through by day, and we’ll also be bringing you some special features and longer guides along the way, to help you plan your weekend before the fest. While these previews won’t span every performer, and might omit some more obvious must-see acts, we hope they’ll serve as a way to help you navigate Bonnaroo’s gargantuan lineup, and to make the most of your busy weekend on the farm!

Grab your tickets right here if you haven’t already, and keep reading to learn more about our Bonnaroo Band of the Day…

LEARN

While they only formally came together as Mt. Joy last year, bandleaders Sam Cooper and Matt Quinn’s musical collaborations can be traced back more than decade, when the pair met in high school, in their native Philadelphia, and made music together until college took them down separate paths, continuing to collaborate, but unsure that music would ever become a serious career path. After they both wound up in Los Angeles several years later for work, they began collaborating more seriously once more, recording some songs in early 2016 and choosing the moniker Mt. Joy, after a real mountain near where they grew up, before being split once more by circumstance, as Cooper returned to Philly for a job, and Quinn enrolled in law school in LA.

The unexpected success of their first single, “Astrovan,” forced the duo to reconsider, and they put career and school projects on hold to make Mt. Joy their full-time focus, recruiting Michael Byrnes, Sotiris Eliopoulos, and Andrew Butler to complete their lineup. Since then, the group have dropped two more well-recieved tracks, “Sheep” and “Cardinal,” honing their folky, indie, and timeless sound a la Bob Dylan or Alabama Shakes. Still a relatively new act, the group’s appearance at Bonnaroo will be their first festival date ever, and comes on the heels of a supporting run with The Head and the Heart. We love Bonnaroo’s Club Stages for their excellent curation of the best of what’s next, and Mt. Joy are not just a perfect fit for the fest, but also a band you’ll undoubtedly be seeing bigger and better things from very soon. Check ’em out below!

LISTEN | “Sheep”