The Fest 22: Notes from Punk Rock's Annual Family Reunion in Gainesville

For twenty-two years, The Fest has transformed Gainesville into punk rock's annual family reunion, drawing thousands to venues all across the city. This year's event came on the heels of my first Content Marketing World conference in San Diego – three days of what felt like speed dating combined with a semester's worth of grad school work. By Friday afternoon, still jet-lagged and disoriented, I was repacking for Gainesville, trading PowerPoints for power chords. The drive settled into that golden hour cruise I always forget I enjoy, Spanish moss and strip malls giving way to the familiar landmarks of one of Florida's most enduring punk scenes.

Notes on Arrival

I made it to Boxcar for check in just after 7:00, struggling to find registration in a room hidden off to the side where they were already packing up. I opened the door and they said registration had closed. A pathetic, jet-lagged puppy dog pout earned me some grace and they checked me in anyway. I grabbed pizza and a saison at a woodfire place around the corner and watched The Iron Roses finish out their set from the patio. Afterward, walking straight to the Heartwood Soundstage, I was chased down by a woman who sent me back to the entrance for an ID check, despite my all-access wristband. At the tent, another woman complimented my "All we are is slow decay" shirt from Burial Brewing saying that it was, “very appropriate,” and we shared a laugh.

Florida Echoes and Further Seems Forever

Further Seems Forever took the stage at Heartwood, different from but connected to the Florida scene I first heard through my stepbrother's bedroom wall in the early nineties. While he blasted the aggressive, rapid-fire punk of NOFX, 7 Seconds, and Face to Face, mixing with the surf culture plastered across his walls, FSF represented another side of Florida's musical heritage: the emotional intensity and metallic edge that would help define early emo. Years later, after moving to Idaho and finding myself surrounded by self-proclaimed holy rollers, both styles of music became my lifeline back to Florida's heat and motion. When I finally found Blink-182's Enema of the State on a choir trip, it felt like rediscovering a language I'd forgotten I knew. It opened me back up to Pennywise and took me down a rabbit hole to punk’s roots in Fugazi and even further back to The Sex Pistols.

Jason Gleason paced through their set, occasionally slipping into those familiar emo stage movements—squeezing his knees together for the high notes—that seemed to belong to a different era. His mic kept cutting out, the cable folded tight against it in a way that made the sound drop during crucial high notes. But from where I stood, the vocals were already hard to hear over the crowd singing along to "The Moon Is Down." A beach ball designed like a basketball bounced through the audience, met with alternating annoyance and enthusiasm. When one woman slapped it hard enough to nail a guy in the glasses fifteen feet away, he just looked shocked for a moment before turning back to the stage. A stranger grabbed my arm, screaming "Oh my god! I love them! I can't believe this is happening!"

As the set closed out, I decided it was time to turn in. After a week of conference schedules and now a night of unchecked decibels (I'd forgotten my earplugs), my brain was struggling to make even simple decisions. I headed back to the Airbnb and set my alarm for a morning run.

Morning Nature Break

Saturday morning, my Garmin showed 100% body battery, suggesting I'd recovered well from the conference. I'd started tracking these metrics to manage my energy, though I was still making sense of what they meant - like how my stress readings spike highest when I'm enjoying myself, whether in crowds or intense meetings. I drove to Curia on the Drag for coffee, settling into the familiar rhythms of a college town not unlike Moscow, Idaho, where I'd found kindred spirits during grad school - Ukrainian students with shrapnel scars from political protests and New York veterans of Occupy Wall Street. The scene felt familiar: vegan food, mocktails, that particular way of carrying yourself when you've grown up in the culture. On the patio, two men discussed video editing, each trying to out-expert the other while the smell of spray paint from a maintenance project drifted over my coffee and muffin.

After grabbing my running shoes from the Airbnb, I headed to Barr Hammock preserve. The warning signs at the trailhead added an edge of Florida reality to my morning run: "No Dogs: Help us protect your dogs from the wildlife and the wildlife from your dogs" - a polite way of saying your pet might become gator food. A cartoon stick figure sinking in "Deep mud like pudding!" reminded visitors to stay on the levee. No music, just nature sounds for a couple miles out and back, letting my mind wander before the afternoon's noise, keeping one eye on the water's edge during gator nesting season.

Afternoon Noise

Bad Cop/Bad Cop was playing when I arrived at Bo Diddley Plaza, pausing between songs to rally the crowd around women's rights and voting. I bought drink tickets and grabbed a burrito from the plaza's permanent stand. Cloud Nothings followed, their singer responding in deadpan to a crowd shout: "Thank you. You're doing a great job, we're doing a great job. Everyone is doing a great job." Later, with the same affect: "Thank you all for having us. This is our second time playing The Fest and everyone in Gainesville is really nice."

Joyce Manor brought a different energy entirely. From my spot at the back of the plaza, I watched circle pits form and crowd surfers emerge. Their lyrics—"I could hear you coming so I hid by the couch" and "You were drunker than high school"—captured a kind of playful self-awareness that matched the crowd's constant motion. When the singer introduced "Catalina Fight Song" with a story about becoming a junior high teacher "not because you want to, but because you don't know WTF else to do," I felt it in my bones. Despite having loved my students, I knew that particular desperation.

On Spiders and Flies

When Cursive began, I moved to the front. I first discovered them in high school through the ringleader of our misfit clique—a mix of metal, punk, and grunge kids who didn't quite fit with the athletes or the preps. He ran a bootleg CD burning business and played sports, which earned him some crossover respect, but mostly he just didn't care what anyone thought. In the Omaha scene they shared with Bright Eyes, Cursive helped prove punk could be sophisticated without losing its edge.

I rediscovered them in Bible college, where their complex melodies and questioning lyrics offered something both disturbing and intriguing. "The Recluse," a song about the morning after a one night stand, builds around a conceited metaphor of a spider and a fly, weaving imagery of codependence through the verses: "I imagine what [her books and notebooks] say, like, 'shoo fly, don't bother me'" building to "You're in my web now - I've come to wrap you up tight 'til it's time to bite down." The same song turns its lens toward grotesque self-awareness: "My ego's like my stomach, it keeps shitting what I feed it." Where many of their peers focused purely on self-expression, Cursive pushed toward something more complex.

Tim Kasher, now 50, commanded the stage with ageless theatrical presence, his face animated and smiling throughout. In his casual button-up and khakis, even during darker songs, he maintained an almost burlesque energy, using broad arm gestures and expressive eyebrows to embody each lyric. I was one of the few people consistently dancing, sharing space with a pink-haired woman who seemed to know every word. The mosh pit formed intermittently—more traditional than Joyce Manor's jumping and surfing, bodies shoving against each other with intentional force. A smile between strangers served as consent: yes, I want this contact, I'm here for this intensity. When my back seized during a brief moment of participation, finding a quick exit felt natural rather than desperate.

During "Art Is Hard," the band pulled back, the volume dropping to a hushed pulse. Something was about to happen, but I wasn't sure what. "Alright guys. I'm confident we can do this. We can do this, you guys," Kasher called out. I watched him gather his mic stand, then his guitar, climbing awkwardly over the barrier. Suddenly he was there, right in front of me, adjusting his equipment as the crowd realized what was happening. Bodies pressed in from all sides as his voice cut through. "Alright, ready? 1, 2, 3, 4! You gotta sink! – "

"— Sink! Sink to swim!" we shouted in response as the mass of bodies compressed tighter, all of us drowning together in the moment. Someone's PBR viking helmet appeared on his head; by the time he surfaced, it had transformed into a multicolored propeller hat.

Superchunk closed out the night, Mac McCaughan's grey hair wild but intentional, his energy undiminished. I spotted Kasher in the backstage area, bobbing his head to the music like any other fan. McCaughan paused between songs to apologize for his home state of Florida being run by a fascist governor. My own energy flagging, I walked out to where the art market vendors were packing up for the night.

The Recluse

Walking back to my car, I met a woman headed to her Subaru, parked right next to mine. She complimented my "Save the books, ban the fascists" bumper sticker and mentioned she was heading to "Queer the Fest." I helped her retrieve some folding chairs from under her car. Part of me wanted to follow this potential friendship, get a second wind, find that surge of energy I used to take for granted. Two years ago at an emo night in Jax, I'd danced the whole time while kids ten years younger than me stood around with drinks in their hands. Tonight I couldn't push through the fatigue.

I sat in my car to charge my phone, falling into a deep conversation about guitar rigs and recording setups with Claude AI. When I tried to start the car later, the battery was dead. After jump-starting it with my own battery pack, I stood in the Airbnb bathroom, contemplating another night in an unfamiliar bed with the hosts in the next room. The festival felt more like visiting a hometown than a church now. I could afford the tickets, the travel, the merchandise I'd once dreamed of buying. My days were filled with crafting messages about human resource management, finding the right words to explain complex services. But here I was, talking gear with AI, reaching for a part of myself I'd set aside when I left music for grad school at 29.

In Moscow, my grad school friends had shown me what living punk meant - their fierce dedication to deconstructing every social norm, questioning the relevance of every given truth. Now I moved between worlds: marketer, writer, former musician, each role as authentic as the last. I grabbed my stuff and headed home. Barthes' Mythologies on audiobook kept me company through the speakers, a different kind of noise for a different kind of life.