Speedy Ortiz is one of three headliners playing This Could Go Boom! Music + Culture Festival on July 26.
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The passionate volunteers behind the inaugural This Could Go Boom! Music + Culture Festival, taking place July 21 through 26, have spent the past two two years creating the event, dedicated to supporting gender diversity and promoting gender equity in music. But for Erin Frisby, it’s been more of a lifelong endeavor. “I remember going to see mothertongue [the local poetry reading series that ran from 1998 to 2013] when I was still in high school or early college and I remember thinking, This is so cool,” Frisby tells City Paper. “It expanded my thinking about what is possible and what kinds of creative friendships and communities I’d be able to find as an adult.”
Now, decades later, as board president and co-founder of This Could Go Boom! and member of local indie band Ammonite, Frisby has become an integral part of D.C.’s creative and performing communities. As part of the weeklong events leading up to the This Could Go Boom! Festival on July 26, Frisby is making their younger self proud by helping plan a mothertongue revival event intended to celebrate the series’ legacy.
Founded by Ruth Dickey and Karen Taggart, the monthly series ran inside the Black Cat from 1998 to 2013 and helped define the city’s literary scene by providing a stage for LGBTQIA women, nonbinary, and trans poets to share their work and convene with each other. The revival event will feature 15 legacy poets from mothertongue’s 15-year run including Dickey, now the executive director of the National Book Foundation, performing alongside two headlining musicians: composer and storyteller Be Steadwell and singer-songwriter Mya Byrne.
As a year-round organization founded in 2018, TCGB! provides musicians from marginalized communities with performance opportunities, access to record labels, and other holistic professional development and support. It was only a matter of time before a music festival celebrating the very artists the org supports was started. So it’s no suprise that This Could Go Boom! is an event born out of the organizers’ love for music, the region’s creative community, and each other. It’s challenging to plan any first-time music and art festival, but even more difficult when the event is volunteer-run and centered around the mission of promoting gender diversity and equity in music. Joining a lineage of politically charged DMV music festivals—including other recent additions a la DC Abortion Fund’s My Body, My Festival, Ekko Astral’s Liberation Weekend, and Home Rule Music Festival—TCGB! expands the map into Maryland with a week of free community programming partially funded by a grant from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority.
Both Frisby and their co-planner Natalie E. Illum, an original board member and longtime host of mothertongue, believe spaces like the one TCGB! is creating for artists and community members alike is especially vital in light of the current political climate. “Spaces for catharsis are especially important this year,” says Frisby. “Our organization focuses on folks who have been marginalized in the arts and music industries due to their gender, who are legislatively and culturally under attack right now. Showing up for this kind of thing, listening to a new perspective you didn’t know about, listening to art-making that might make you uncomfortable or cause you to ask questions is growing in importance. We’re all looking for avenues of connection and togetherness and to grow our capacity for understanding.”
Illum, a poet who’s been performing in the DMV since 1999, is hopeful that the festival will spark connections between attendees and artists to continue growing creative collaborations in the region. “There’s a generation interested in bringing mothertongue back,” says Illum. “I’m glad this conversation is happening and I’m excited to see what connections are made between art and poetry and performance after this.”
With this intention at the forefront of planning, the festival’s 15-person steering committee has worked hard to curate wide-ranging events that offer something for every type of music fan. The week’s programming kicks off with an open mic hosted by Flowerbomb’s Abby Rasheed on July 21 at Denizens Brewing Co. Local teen punk band Petrichor headline the July 22 Youth Night, which is co-hosted by Girls Rock! DC—the same rock camp that brought the members of Petrichor together. On July 23, TCGB! teams up with DC Bushwick Book Club for a night of live performances inspired by Ryka Aoki’s book Light from Uncommon Stars. TCGB!’s punk night featuring Professor Goldstein & The Adjuncts, Spring Silver, and others takes place on July 24. The mothertongue revival and retrospective, which reunites poets from the original series, closes out the warm-up events on July 25 at Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier.
The main event takes place on Saturday, July 26, with a free daylong music festival. Alongside nationally recognized headliners Speedy Ortiz, Crys Matthews, and River Shook, more than two dozen local artists will play across six stages, including a special reunion set from Lightmare. The behemoth of a festival, showcasing the breadth and diversity of the DMV’s musical artists, takes place at Bladensburg Waterfront Park in Prince George’s County.
With this ambitious week of events, the organizers hope to bring together Washingtonians through music, poetry, and art. While most of the week’s programming is free, all funds raised from the festival will go right back into TCGB!’s programming.
Putting on a weeklong festival is no easy task, but Frisby says it’s worth the work. “We have the ability to call out what we don’t want and tear down what is terrible but also to create what we do want and absolutely revel in our joy as a form of resistance,” they say. “I’ll lose some sleep for that.”
This Could Go Boom! Music + Culture Festival “pregame” runs July 21 through 25. The main event takes place from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on July 26 at Bladensburg Waterfront Park, 4601 Annapolis Rd., Bladensburg. thiscouldgoboom.com. All ages, with accessible facilities. Free.