Event Review: Lutsong Music Festival in Lutsen, Minnesota
The intimate gathering on Lake Superior’s North Shore was an enchanting experience and a reminder to share art and savor life.
Nick Salisbury, Lars-Erik Larson & Jack Klatt, Lutsong Music Festival, 2025. Photo credit: Doyle Turner.
Hey kid, someday you’ll be a captain
someday you’ll be captain of this boat
someday you’ll be a world navigator
but for now, row fisherman row
“Captain” by Teague Alexy
The 2025 Lutsong Music Festival ended with breakfast underneath the giant tent where so many artists had offered themselves and their songs.
So much had transpired in this space, from morning yoga with Mary Bue to campfire song pulls into the early hours of the morning. The festival, which unfolds near the base of the Lutsen Mountains, complete with sweeping views leading down to the great, assuring, and vast waters of Lake Superior, was a summer dream. From the grounded opening set by the Stonebridge Singers drum group to the taught lyrical sensibility of Turn, Turn, Turn, this space had been hallowed by the conversation between listener and musician. This sunny spot held both generous offering and grateful receiving.
As in most summer camping trips, everyone brought what they had and shared it with one another. Everyone rowed the boat. On the closing day of Lutsong 2025, Teague Alexy sat on the stage that had witnessed so very much and sang these lines with a wry and knowing smile:
Life can be a sucker punch from a southpaw
it’s a submarine you never saw coming
when you have the chance, my captain
use your sea legs and stand up for something
His soon-to-be-released song “Captain” was a call to action. Take what you’ve been given here and use it to “stand up for something.” It was also a calling to do the work of this life; “row, man, row.” It was a calling to each of us: “You were born to be a captain all along.”
Nikki Lemire & Sarah Morris, Lutsong Music Festival, 2025. Photo credit: Doyle Turner.
Alexy’s words were the perfect benediction to a stunning weekend filled with unbelievable music and performers at every turn. There was beauty in every corner, like a group hike into the woods to hear Nikki Lemire’s otherworldly voice rise above the rushing of a nearby Sawtooth Mountain stream just as the sun broke through a morning rain. The sun’s reflection off wet leaves gathered on the faces of Lemire and songwriter Sarah Morris, seemingly to join the play of their voices on an acoustic performance of Morris’ “Ruthless.”
Jeremy Messersmith, Lutsong Music Festival, 2025. Photo credit: Doyle Turner.
There was the delight of Jeremy Messersmith’s intelligent lyrics, easy banter, sardonic wit, and Atticus Finch eyeglasses. The crowd sat fascinated, waiting to hear what might next escape from his brain out into the air. There were moments where festival goers reached out to others who were seated by themselves, inviting them to come over and join a group with an open spot at a picnic table. There were Lutsongers singing to campfire flames in the dark night, sharing their voices and their songs.
The Honeydogs, Lutsong Music Festival, 2025. Photo credit: Doyle Turner.
The Honeydogs seared their lightning strike of a set into the darkening July sky, overhead lights twinkling an invitation to the stars. Festival attendees spread out comfortably amidst the green grass of the natural amphitheater to enjoy the smart rock and roll sensibility of an established band with an album release date 10 days away.
Lynden Graham, Lutsong Music Festival, 2025. Photo credit: Doyle Turner.
There were words of gratitude: “Thank you to the Lutsong’s Songwriter’s Retreat. I was given a scholarship to attend the retreat this spring from the North Shore Music Association, and every song I’ll play for the rest of this set has come since attending that retreat in April.” Lynden Graham spoke these words into the microphone at the Caribou Tent East during his Lutsong festival premiere. His riveting, charismatic delivery ranged from shouts and growls to whispered lyrics about lonesome towns.
Josh Cleveland Band, Lutsong Music Festival, 2025. Photo credit: Doyle Turner.
There were blues, deep and resonant, buoyed by light summer breeze above and behind the polished Josh Cleveland Band on the North Shore Winery stage in the festival’s closing Sunday set.
There’s something different about Lutsong. You can feel it the moment you approach the entrance. This is something built on connection. The fact that you are recognized and greeted by name the moment you step on the grounds tells you of the intimacy of this gathering. You have moments of feeling as though you are at the world’s best summer camp, where all the campers share a passion for outstanding songwriting and performance.
Lutsong is the antithesis to the classic large summer music festival with a crushing mass of humanity. It’s more of an enchanting summer retreat. Organizers Scott Schuler, Chuck Corliss, and Molly Maher have created a festival that is extraordinary. They’ve carved out a place, as if from the very stone of the Lutsen Mountains, for listeners and performers to connect in an intimate and open way.
Jack Klatt, Lutsong Music Festival, 2025. Photo credit: Doyle Turner.
If you’d like to shake Nicky Diamonds’ hand and tell him about his stellar guitar tone and heart-stopping self-reflecting lyric “I’m going to kill what cannot die,” you catch him as he listens to the Twins of Franklin perform a little later in the day. If you’d like to compliment Jack Klatt on his hard-won and authentic lyrics in “Love Me Lonely,” you walk on over after his set and tell him your reaction to this opening verse:
My love speaks through cigarettes
her life folds in a trunk
she don’t heed the church bells
cause time given is enough
It’s the kind of atmosphere where musicians call other musician friends out of the listening crowd to jump up on stage and help out on a song. Teague Alexy looked out over the last day of Lutsong and sang to the Sunday sun:
Hey kid, someday you’ll be a captain
someday you’ll be captain of this boat
you can throw yourself overboard
trust there’ll be someone to throw you the rope
Sitting at his feet were his friends who’d heard this song in guitar pulls at prior Lutsong festivals. They’d heard this song in its infancy, and had run up to sit on the edge of the stage and sing the response to Alexy’s call. They joined him for the joy of it. They sang to help row the boat of the song, just as any friend would do if you needed it: lending a hand. Lutsong created the marvel of that moment, of Mary Bue and organizer Molly Maher sitting at the edge of the stage, singing right along with a song that had grown up and developed at past Lutsong Festivals.
You were never born to be a fisherman
you were born to be a captain all along
spinning the wheel against the horizon
singing an old pirate song
Lutsong guitar pull, 2025. Photo courtesy of festival organizers.
The smell of woodsmoke still emanates from my sweatshirt the day after my first Lutsong. The welcome aroma brings back the vivid images and celestial notes of days packed from horizon to horizon, from start to finish, with community and connection—songwriters to listeners, performers to the open North Shore sky.
Lutsong is, ultimately, a place where you can unfold your camp chair in almost any spot on the grounds of the Caribou Highlands Lodge between the Sawtooth Mountains and the most Superior of lakes, and find your place.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Doyle Turner. Photo credit: no_aesthetic_stills.
Doyle Turner loves words. Whether it is shaping syllables into songs, poems, early morning journals, handwritten thank yous, lists, or album reviews, he is in a deep and abiding relationship with his college-ruled paper, Uniball Signo 207 .7mm pens, and mostly his keyboard. A good day is spent taking pictures, mailing things, making the words convey the precise meaning, driving, and singing.
