This year’s Faster Horses Festival takes place in Michigan this weekend, and the lineup is stacked with some of country music’s biggest names including Keith Urban, Maren Morris, Brett Young, Lindsay Ell, Old Dominion, Zac Brown Band and more.
For Ell, Faster Horses is one of her favorite festivals to play, partially due to the its location. The festival takes place at the Michigan International Speedway, which means that the speedway essentially turns in to a country music campground, with fans flocking from all over specifically to attend the festival.
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“Faster Horses is one of the coolest festivals in the country,” Ell told PopCulture.com. “I love watching what can be set up in the middle of a field. It’s like a whole world gets put together for thousands of country music fans. Everyone is so excited to be there, cause they’ve traveled just for Faster Horses, and you can feel that kind of special energy in an audience.”
Urban will close out the festival’s main stage on Friday night, Toby Keith will wrap things up on Saturday and Zac Brown Band will close the festival on Sunday, July 21. Along with the main stage, Faster Horses also features the Dish Next From Nashville Stage, which will feature up and coming acts including Kassi Ashton, Dillon Carmichael, HARDY and Rachel Wammack.
Ell recently shared another bill with Morris when the two women performed at Chicago’s Country LakeShake festival on a day when the entire lineup featured female artists. At the end of the day, closing act Miranda Lambert brought out Ell, Morris, Cassadee Pope, Lauren Alaina and Pistol Annies Members Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley for a rousing rendition of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” an experience Ell says she’ll never forget.
“That five minutes, it was so memorable,” she reflected. “It kind of made us all emotional. Cassadee’s one of my best friends in town, and we got on stage and I had tears in my eyes on stage ’cause we don’t get moments like that that often. It was one of the coolest moments I’ve had on stage in a long time.”
The Canadian singer shared that she appreciated that the lineup was all women, it wasn’t promoted as such.
“It was just a day of the festival, but the fact that it was all women, I felt, selfishly, so happy because I got to hang out with all of my friends in one place while we were working, but it was so special to be able to stand on that stage and be like, ‘Women clearly want to hear women,’ ’cause you look out into the audience and it was 70 percent women,” she explained. “It was the best ticket-selling day of all of the festival, and it was a really nice reminder to be like, ‘You know what? All these things that we randomly hear about, they’re not always true.’”
Photo Credit: Getty / Terry Wyatt
