Concerts

The annual Fifth Third Bank Summer Concerts at Meijer Gardens concert series brings the finest national and international musicians to West Michigan, thrilling music lovers across all generations and genres.

Tuesday Evening Music Club brings talented local and regional musicians and cultural organizations to the Frederik Meijer Gardens Amphitheater stage, on Tuesday evenings throughout June, July and August.

Since forming in 2004, Lake Street Dive have matched their sophisticated musicianship with a fearless refusal to limit their sound. As shown on their most recent album, 2021's critically acclaimed Obviously, the Boston-bred band also possess a keen talent for combining sociopolitical commentary with immediately catchy pop gems. With their current lineup comprised of founding members Rachael Price (vocals), Bridget Kearney (bass), and Michael Calabrese (drums) -- as well as keyboardist/vocalist Akie Bermiss and touring guitarist James Cornelison -- Lake Street Dive continue to create joyously soulful rock & roll with equal parts ingenuity, intelligence, and irresistible abandon.

As The Beach Boys mark more than a half century of making music, the group continues to ride the crest of a wave unequalled in America’s musical history. The Beach Boys – who have become synonymous with the California lifestyle and an American icon, are bringing their “Sixty Years of the Sounds of Summer” tour to fans around the world. Since the band’s co-founder, lead-singer and chief lyricist Mike Love penned the lyrics to The Beach Boys’ first hit, “Surfin’” (1961), dozens of the bands chart toppers have become eternal anthems of American youth: “Surfin’ USA,” “Surfer Girl,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around,” “California Girls,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “Barbara Ann,” “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Rock and Roll Music” and “Kokomo.”

The Beach Boys have sold over 100 million records worldwide and have received more than 33 RIAA Platinum and Gold record awards. The Rock And Roll Hall of Famers where also honored at the 2001 Grammy Awards with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

With more than five decades of touring under their belts, The Beach Boys have performed more concerts than any major rock band in history. Sounds Of Summer: The Very Best Of The Beach Boys, Capitol/EMI's 30-track collection of the band's biggest hits, has achieved triple platinum success with sales of more than three million copies in the U.S. since its release. The Beach Boys are led by Mike Love, who, along with longtime member Bruce Johnston, musical director Scott Totten, Brian Eichenberger, Christian Love, Tim Bonhomme, John Cowsill, Keith Hubacher and Randy Leago continue the legacy of the iconic band. Please note, this concert will not feature Brian Wilson, Al Jardine or David Marks.

Franklin Park

For over 20 years The Decemberists have been one of the most original, daring, and thrilling American rock bands. Founded in the year 2000 when singer, songwriter, and guitarist Colin Meloy moved from Montana to Portland, Oregon and met bassist Nate Query, keyboardist Jenny Conlee, and guitarist Chris Funk, The Decemberists’ distinctive brand of hyperliterate folk-rock set them apart from the start with the release of their debut EP 5 Songs in 2001. After making their full-length debut with Castaways and Cutouts in 2002, the band signed with Kill Rock Stars for the release of the acclaimed albums Her Majesty the Decemberists (2003) and Picaresque (2005), which was produced by Chris Walla. The 2004 EP The Tain – an 18-minute single-track epic – made the band’s grand creative ambitions clear.

Around this time the band’s permanent line-up fell into place with the arrival of drummer John Moen, and they made the unexpected leap to Capitol Records for their first major label album in 2006. Fans’ concerns of whether the band would alter their trademark sound quickly vanished when they delivered their most ambitious and audacious record to date in The Crane Wife, a song cycle produced by Walla and Tucker Martine (who would become a longtime creative partner) that added elements of ‘70s prog, hard rock and even quasi-disco to their palette. The album was met by wide acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Stereogum, and was named Best New Music by Pitchfork.

Over the past 20 years The Decemberists have toured the world, performed at countless major festivals, and even founded Travelers’ Rest, a festival of their own curation in Missoula, Montana. The band has appeared on The Simpsons, collaborated with Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, and released their own crowd-funded board game Illimat.

It's appropriate that Boz Scaggs' new album is Out of the Blues, since the blues is what first sparked his five-decade musical career.

Born William Royce Scaggs in Canton, Ohio on June 8, 1944, he grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, where he spent his teenage years immersed in the blues, R&B and early rock 'n' roll. While attending school in Dallas, he played in local combos. After several years as a journeyman musician around Madison, WI and Austin, TX, Scaggs spent time traveling in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, eventually settling in Stockholm where he recorded the album Boz.

"Music has been a constant companion and I'm feeling more free with it than ever," Scaggs comments. "I feel like I've found my voice through all these years, and I've gotten closer to where I want to be with my approach."

Jeff LeBlanc will be opening the show.

Ralston & Friends

UMPHREY’S McGEE

by David Fricke

Singer-guitarist Brendan Bayliss had just landed in Los Angeles after a flight from Chicago, expecting to start a West Coast tour with Umphrey's McGee, when he found a text on his phone. It basically said, "You're going home."

Keyboard player Joel Cummins, who lives in L.A., was in San Diego, squeezing in some golf before the shows, when his phone lit up. And guitarist Jake Cinninger was at his home studio in Niles, Michigan – across the state line from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, birthplace of Umphrey's McGee – about to leave for the airport when he got the news.

It was March, 2020 – the first shock and whiplash of pandemic lockdown. After 22 years on the road and a dozen ambitious and eclectic studio albums, including the 2004 breakthrough Anchor Drops, 2009's prog-rock trip Mantis and 2015's The London Session, recorded in a single day at Abbey Road, Umphrey's McGee – Bayliss, Cummins, Cinninger, bassist Ryan Stasik, drummer Kris Myers and percussionist Andy Farag – were grounded until further notice.

"I remember almost vibrating, like an anxiety attack," Cinninger says now. "We were always in motion, going forward. It's weird when that stops on a dime." Cummins sat in his house, "just beside myself," he says, "because I didn't know when I would play music with my friends again."

"Everyone was guilty of taking a couple of weeks, just staring at the sky," Bayliss says. "Then you run out of excuses to not do anything." Emails flew back and forth "with ideas and chord progressions" as Bayliss, stuck at home, worked on lyrics for a pair of songs already underway: "Always October," an anxious meditation with a jolting chorus, started at a Nashville session in the fall of 2019; and the helplessness in "I Don't Know What I Want," a combined reflection on solitary confinement and heavy, personal loss. In June, 2019, Bayliss' friend Jeff Austin, the former mandolinist in Yonder Mountain String Band, died unexpectedly. "I'm only looking for an antidote," Bayliss wrote in the song. "What if I'm only asking for a friend?"

"I was thinking about a friend that I couldn't help," he admits, adding, "There's something to be said for speaking your mind. If it's a true emotion, it's something everyone can feel: 'Why is this happening to me?'"

Grand Rapids Ballet