Mike Wilson
The Shins

DeLuna Festival wasn't quite brain-melting, body-beating, or simply depraved like many of my previous festival experiences. It was pretty tame by comparison, yet I loved it, maybe even more at times, than the typical outdoor mega-fest. Am I getting old? Or is the idea of a mid-October music festival on a North Florida beach one of the best to hit the circuit, ever? [Text by Andrew, photos by Mike.]

While reveling in the dirt, dozing off in shoddy tents, and finding your spirit animal or whatever at a back country fest is admittedly pretty awesome, it's fucking difficult, too. DeLuna was easy, almost too easy; think like, the Sandals resort of weekend music festivals. You've got two main stages right on the beach flanked by three mega-corporate hotels (Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Hampton Inn), and three smaller stages dotting the parking lots with 80 or so bands playing throughout the weekend.

Shirtless dads, their sun-wrinkled counterparts, and pint-sized offspring looked just as much at home on the DeLuna grounds as the ironically mustachioed pale 20-somethings. The blend was pretty fascinating in a social-experiment-y kind of way. It's oddly endearing seeing things like a Baby Gap-era boy perched on his dad's shoulders during The Shins [Mercer pictured right], some lady surely fresh from the denizens of cubicle life gyrating to The Constellations, or the dude with his washer-worn Stone Temple Pilots tour shirt discovering the psyched-out weirdness of War on Drugs.

Dinosaur Feathers
Mike Wilson

DAY 1

At the start, you'd hardly expect this, though. By mid-day Friday, DeLuna was more like a barren ghost town than the "America's Best Beach Party!" it had made itself out to be. A front-row spot at Margot and the Nuclear So So's felt more like a favor than actual eagerness to experience. The droll, bedside lull of, like, all their songs didn't help lift the spirits much, either. Grunge, mid-90s inspired alt rock — whatever you want to call it, it has its place. But after an overly rote set from the So and So's, the realization hit that said place is definitely not on a sun-seared beach in the middle of the afternoon.

After navigating through the salty, beachside bar neighboring the stage ($9 hamburgers, anyone?), Mike Wilson, my handy and apparently law-breaking (more on that later) photographer decided to hit up an asphalt lot performance from recent Peter Bjorn and John openers, Dinosaur Feathers, which provided a welcome jolt out of my initial DeLuna dreariness. While their set wasn't anything new or particularly brilliant, it was a breezy venture in past-pop, dabbling in influence from the Beach Boys to the Everly Brothers, Elvis Costello, and surely a few others. Enthusiastic harmonies and general cheeriness reverberated from band to the still laughably-small crowd.

This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2011.