Field Notes
The Light of Pickathon
Pickathon is a roots music festival on a farm outside Portland. A note on what makes it different and why the 2009 edition was worth attending.
Pickathon takes place every August on a farm in Happy Valley, Oregon, about ten miles southeast of Portland. The festival is run on principles that distinguish it from the large commercial festival format: no single-use plastic, camping required, a relatively small attendance cap, and a booking policy that prioritizes music over spectacle.
The 2009 edition had a lineup that reflected those priorities. The artists booked were drawn from the Americana, folk, and roots traditions. Not exclusively — there was rock and there was something more experimental — but the center of gravity was the tradition.
What Pickathon is
The farm format makes the festival different in quality from a park or fairground event. The stages are distributed across the property. The acoustic stage in the barn is the most distinctive. A barn with good acoustics and an audience seated on bales is a room that makes the music sound differently than a main stage with a line array.
The music and the setting are matched. This is not always the case at music festivals, where the event infrastructure often works against the music it is supposedly presenting.
The 2009 lineup
The specific acts at Pickathon 2009 included Fleet Foxes, which gave rise to the interview on this site (the world's most awkward interview with Robin Pecknold). The broader lineup covered the range of the contemporary Americana and folk scene.
The Tallest Man on Earth was there. So were several acts from the Portland and Pacific Northwest Americana community that was particularly active in this period.
The light
The title of this entry is about the physical quality of the farm at Pickathon in late afternoon. The Oregon summer light at five o'clock on a farm, with hay fields and trees and a sky that has not yet committed to evening, is a specific thing. It is the correct light for this music. Not romantic in a greeting card sense. Just accurate.
For the Fleet Foxes interview that resulted from this festival: The world's most awkward interview with Robin Pecknold. The 2011 Pickathon lineup note: Pickathon Announces Lineup.