Catching up With Ashley Capps About the 2026 Big Ears Lineup & Beyond

The 2026 Big Ears Festival lineup has just been announced and it’s a banger. Featuring over 250 events in 20+ downtown venues across four days (March 26-29), Big Ears is a world-renowned, boundary-defying celebration of music and art. It never ceases to feel wild to me that Knoxville gets to host it.  

Festival passes go on sale Thursday, Sept. 11 at 9 a.m., with early access for previous attendees beginning Wednesday, Sept. 10 at 9 a.m. Worth noting, two concerts this year will be separately ticketed: David Byrne’s two performances of Who Is The Sky? and Robert Plant’s Saving Grace. Both will feature reserved seating, with early access and preferred pricing for festival passholders.

 An aside: my sister-in-law, Tricia Bateman, is a freelance art director in her third year of serving as the festival’s designer. She shared this about the inspiration behind this year’s look: 

“Chladni patterns happen when sound is applied to a thin metal plate with sand, salt or other fine grit. It is literally what sound looks like. Most people won’t know that, so I included instrument shapes within the Chladni patterns. I love how it allows for a mix of interpretations. Yes, Chladni patterns, but also kaleidoscopes and mandalas. Much like the festival, you see in it what you want to see.”

Unexpected patterns emerging, surprise synchronicities of art, the spiritual and meditative quality of the festival especially with many shows in sacred spaces … all of that feels especially relevant to a phone conversation I had last Thursday with Ashley Capps, Big Ears executive and artistic director. Storms were rolling through, so both of us had retreated to the centers of our respective South Knoxville homes, away from the noise and hail hammering the windows. 

Despite the chaos weather, it was a rich conversation.

LWB: Thanks for sharing the lineup with me a little early. It looks great!

AC: You know, I’ve been pretty proud of it to tell you the truth. It’s been a long time coming together. But it’s hard to go wrong, really, with David Byrne and Robert Plant in the mix. It’s been quite a summer preparing for it all.

LWB: Every edition of the festival has its own personality. And you can get a sense of it in advance, but I never really know what it’s really going to feel like until I’m in it. Does this one have a particular vibe for you?

AC: I mean, certainly there have been ideas that have flowed through the festival in different ways. Sometimes it’s just the work of a particular artist and the various directions in which it radiates out to influence other artists. And a lot of times it’s a culmination of conversations that have actually been going on for a long time. 

One show that I’m really excited about this year is Ghost Train Orchestra, which is performing the music of Moondog. Moondog is this admittedly obscure American composer who used to be in Times Square every day, dressed like a Viking, back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. But he was also a serious composer. He ultimately moved to Europe and spent his last decades writing and recording. Brian Carpenter, who leads Ghost Train Orchestra, basically single-handedly launched a revival of Moondog’s work. He and I have been talking about this show for, like, three years. It has special guests all the time; when I saw it, David Byrne and Karen Mantler and several of the people that are going to be at this festival this year were guests in that particular performance, because Moondog had an incredible influence on a lot of other musicians. 

So that’s a project that takes some time, and it’s a large ensemble. And there are a lot of little things to coordinate in the meantime. Ghost Train Orchestra also recorded with David Byrne on his new record that’s coming out here in a few weeks. So there’s a collaboration there that’s completely unrelated to the fact that both of them are coming here. There are little things like that that I end up discovering that I didn’t even realize when I was putting the pieces together. That’s part of the fun, though, to see how it emerges. Like, oh, yeah, there’s an idea running through here. Who knew?

LWB: That organic cross pollination and those thru-threads are always so interesting.

AC: But it’s also one of the reasons it’s kind of difficult, having the opportunity to do an annual festival like this, because some of the conversations can span several years before they come together. It’s gotten to the point now where conversations about who’s going to perform at the festival are happening all year long. It almost feels like each festival is kind of a snapshot of a work that’s continually in progress. 

So we’re going to have a snapshot of 2026, and we’re revealing that now. But there’s a lot about 2027 that’s already in the works. The interest in the festival has grown to the point where we could put together three weekends’ worth of Big Ears each year, because it’s attracted the interest of so many great artists. So it’s always a challenge to really focus it down to even what still seems like a tremendous number of artists each year.

LWB: Is there anything else you want folks to know?

AC: There are always new things evolving as part of the festival experience. And while we’re revealing not all, but probably 95 to 98% of the music that’s going to be happening this year, there are so many things related to film and conversations and workshops and really cool installations we’ve got happening. Increasingly, we’re attracting a lot of people from the music industry who are part of the ecosystem around all of this music. And more and more people are interested in doing activations and sharing the work that they do with the people who attend the festival. 

It really does grow organically, and it grows through the influence and interest of a lot of different people and and in many ways. My job has become just trying to carefully nurture it. To try to pick out the weeds when they need to be picked out, and to water the plants. It feels a lot like gardening, actually. And then, every now and then you think, OK, we’re gonna go over there and we’re gonna plow up that little section of the yard and put in a new garden. That’s kind of the way it works.

LWB: I love that. Anything new with venues?

AC: Well, we have a couple of new venues this year which we’re not ready to tell anyone about yet. But we’ve got some really cool spaces that we’re going to use this year that we’ve never used before. So we’re pretty excited about that. We’ll see how it unfolds between now and March. 

Keep up with all the latest Big Ears news: Website | Facebook | Instagram | X | Spotify

My 2025 festival write-ups: “Big Ears Through the Kaleidoscope: Part 1 and Part 2“