The toughest lineup conflicts at Big Ears 2025

From March 27–30, amid the University of Tennessee men’s and women’s basketball teams’ dominant runs in the 2025 NCAA tournament, downtown Knoxville will be overrun with experimental music, forcing fans in Tennessee Orange apparel to wade through a sea of vintage band tees. Every year at Big Ears, genre-blurring giants perform across a dozen-odd venues. Unlike most festivals, here one can find these artists darting excitedly between shows alongside the dedicated fans who make the annual pilgrimage to the state capital.

Big Ears 2025’s lineup is especially stacked, featuring ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Beth Gibbons, esperanza spalding, Jessica Pratt, Lonnie Holley, Melvin Gibbs, Michael Hurley, Swamp Dogg, Vijay Ayer, Wadada Leo Smith, William Basinski, Yo La Tengo with Sun Ra Arkestra, and so many more icons and ascendant masters.

Unfortunately, the decision between basketball and music isn’t the only one the Big Ears faithful will need to make this weekend. Each year, the festival makes a valiant effort to allow its attendees to see as much music as possible. But with so many performers crammed into one long weekend, overlap is inevitable. Below are five of the most difficult choices festivalgoers will face at Big Ears 2025.

On Big Ears’ opening night, folk-rock veteran Cass McCombs will play the Knoxville Civic Auditorium from 8:00–9:00, with Danish singer, composer, and violist Astrid Sonne — a relative newcomer to the world stage — kicking off a 75-minute set at the First Presbyterian Sanctuary at 8:15.

McCombs is one of the greatest lyricists of our time, sweetly delivering enigmatic and personal but often transcendent poetry over relatively traditional — but by no means banal — guitar-led arrangements. Sonne’s innovations, on the other hand, come in the form of eerie collisions of disparate sounds and structures. On her breakthrough album, 2024’s Great Doubt, she juxtaposes ambient, ethereal treble passages with hard-hitting bass and drum grooves, fusing them into oddly shaped pop formations with smooth vocal lines perched precariously on top.

Luckily for festivalgoers dead set on catching both acts, the two venues are just a five-minute walk from each other.

Big Ears’ most complex choose-your-own-adventure game will begin in the early evening hours of its second day. Legendary percussionist Thor Harris, once a key member of the notoriously deafening noise rock band Swans, will play from 5:00–6:15 at the First Presbyterian Sanctuary. Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn, whose recent collaborative albums Pigments and Quiet in a World Full of Noise meld Zahn’s technical and inventive guitar playing with Richard’s astounding and elastic vocals to create strangely beautiful entities of experimental sound, will take the Bijou Theatre stage from 5:15–6:30. 83-year-old free jazz icon Wadada Leo Smith, whose groundbreaking compositions leave room for endless interpretation, will present a suite of pieces inspired by Central Park, performed by the RedKoral string quartet, from 5:30–6:30 at St. John’s Cathedral. Singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt, who has graced the world with four albums of haunting, gorgeous songs delivered in a small but penetrating voice unlike any other, will play from 5:45–7:00 at the Tennessee Theatre. And Swamp Dogg, who’s been transcending the boundaries between blues, country, bluegrass, R&B, and soul for more than half a century, will go on from 6:00–7:15 at Jackson Terminal.

Even the savviest of Knoxville navigators will have a difficult time checking out more than two of these shows.

أحمد [Ahmed] are among the most fascinating acts scheduled to perform at Big Ears 2025. The quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums) and Seymour Wright (alto sax) create music in conversation with the wildly innovative compositions of jazz luminary Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Unfortunately, both of the group’s sets at the festival — Friday from 9:45–11:00 and Saturday from 10:00–11:15 at Regas Square — are pitted against performances by legends in their own fields.

AHNONI, whose breathtakingly resonant falsetto stands among those of the all-time greats, has been releasing heartbreaking soul music since the turn of the millennium with her ultra-tight backing band, the Johnsons. They’ll play the Knoxville Civic Auditorium on Friday from 9:00–11:00. Then, on Saturday from 9:30–11 at the same venue, folk-rock scene leader and generational songwriter Waxahatchee will play her voluminous tunes.

Sadly, Regas Square is far enough from the Civic Auditorium that catching أحمد [Ahmed] either night will mean missing a significant chunk of ANOHNI’s or Waxahatchee’s set, forcing those of us interested in all three shows to make more than one difficult decision.

Another tough choice presents itself on Saturday afternoon, when Beak> and Julia Holter both play from 3:15-4:30, the former at Mill & Mine and the latter at the Tennessee Theatre. Beak> — the trio of Geoff Barrow (Portishead), Billy Fuller (The Sensational Space Shifters) and Will Young (Moon Gangs) — have been releasing elite, krautrock-influenced electronic music since 2009, not to mention producing Anika’s cult-favorite debut album in 2010. Holter has been spinning warped webs of lush experimental pop for nearly 20 years. Fans of both acts will be forced to miss one of the festival’s most exciting sets.

Sunday’s schedule has two can’t-miss midafternoon sets: Mary Lattimore, who has defied preconceptions of the harp as simply a vehicle for stately, fanciful music with her resolutely strange, ambient-leaning pieces, will play from 2:45–4:00 at the Bijou Theatre. And Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti, whose work has ranged from uninhibited experimentalism to the twisted rock figurations of her most recent album, Sentir que no sabes, will perform from 3:15–4:30 at Jackson Terminal. Both artists have taken their traditionally classical instruments into uncharted waters. Sadly, the distance between the Bijou and Jackson will make it hard to take in both shows.