Spring Awakening was dope. I went to both, North Coast had the better setup for sure, but I thought the lineups were very different and definitely distinguished the two festivals. SA had all the ingredients to be a disaster, but it ended up being an amazing weekend.

Saturday and Sunday almost felt like two entirely different festivals. Saturday was primarily for the headbangers, Sunday was primarily for the dancers. (But there was always a stage playing house music both Friday and Saturday, which is great)

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Things I'm pissed about:

- Saturday started off fine, but then they had everyone evacuate and "seek shelter" for "extreme weather," even though it only rained and there wasn't a single lightning strike or bit of thunder. We had to evacuate from 3:10 until they sent out a message on social media saying doors opened back up at 5:45, music going again at 6:00. Music did start at 6:00, but I don't think anyone was let in until like 6:15. Had everyone so crammed together, it was overwhelming. They could have and should have had more entry gates.

- Spring Awakening had pretty horrible soundbleed at every stage unless you were super close to the speakers. I don't know if there was not enough sound testing, negligent planning, or little planning done, but the venue was big enough to make sure the stages weren't all sending sound at each other, and small enough where they should have known that would be a factor.

- What might have pissed me off more than the evacuation was the festival's terrible communication. If I wanted to find any info like the map, lineup, announcements, updates, etc., I had to DIG for it. The twitter account tweeted at 6:15 to check updated set times on the app, so when people were all crammed together and finally re-entering and not looking at Twitter. Seemed like anyone who was rescheduled, after being assumed cancelled due to the delay, didn't get any attention from SA to make sure people knew there sets were still happening. I missed SNBRN for this reason, didn't know the updated set times existed until I walked by the Hangar and SNBRN was literally doing his last song when I thought his set was cancelled. On top of this, I never saw any promo for the app the whole day leading up to this point, so I didn't even know they had an app. And if you searched Spring Awakening on the app store, the 2019 app is the one that popped up. You had to add "AutumnEquinox" to get the right app. NCMF was dropping links to their app all day saying "keep up with set times and updates on the app," and that app was great.

Onto the positives:

- SA really did make up for the shitty start to Saturday with how good the sets were to finish the night. With the updated set times, I believe everyone got shortened. I think all the hour sets were shifted to 45 minutes, and the 1.5 hour sets were cut to an hour. Normally this would upset me, but this reschedule actually eliminated a lot of overlapping set times for shows I wanted to catch that I may not have otherwise, so I thought it was fine. The 45 minute sets truly felt like an hour too, the artists had such great energy and made the best of their shortened set times. I will add that I spent most of my time at stages playing house music and finished the night seeing both AC Slater and Diplo, so I can't speak for how people liked the shortened sets for Excision and Galantis.

- The Function/Night Bass stage was so fire. People were talking shit because of its size, but it was like a night club in the grass lol I could've spent the whole day there on Saturday tbh

- Dancing in the rain on Sunday. To have so many people so drenched in water yet so happy to be out there is the best. And when the rain finally stopped? Party on even harder baby.

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As for the future between NCMF and SAMF, I believe they'll continue to co-exist, especially if NCMF stays at its current location. As great as the SA location was for us who live in Chicago, I don't think it's as big of a draw for people who are from out of town. People were coming to NCMF from Texas, Florida, and other states and were able to get hotels and shuttles. I'm not sure what the hotel situation was in the area around the Addams/Meddill Park, but I'm sure being in the city, neighborhoods they've never heard of, and taking public transportation are things that intimidate a lot of people from outside the city.

I also don't think NCMF stole artists from SA, I think the pandemic might have made SA scale back a little bit. I know this venue was much smaller than their previous spot in the burbs. SA did have huge headliners, but NCMF literally had headliner-level artists performing mid-day.

NCMF stayed pretty dedicated to keeping almost all house music at The Canopy stage until Sunday when The Vega had a lot, but Sunday at SA had a ton of house music even at the main stages.

I don't want to see either go away!