Dave Matthews, Neil Young Announce Farm Aid

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Dave Matthews, Neil Young, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp will head to Chicago this year for Farm Aid. The twentieth-anniversary concert, to be held at the Tweeter Center on September 18th, will wrap a weeklong series of events, including club shows and a film festival, in the city to benefit American farmers.

"It's good to be back in Illinois where it all started," Nelson said Monday at a press conference at Chicago's Grant Park. "This state is showing how good food can connect places like Champaign and Chicago. It inspires us to think about family farmers every day. I'm looking forward to playing on the Farm Aid stage, playing music with my friends."

Farm Aid, which began in Champaign in 1985, was the brainchild of Bob Dylan and spearheaded by Nelson and Mellencamp. The concerts have raised $27 million for family-owned American farms.

Tickets to this year's show go on sale July 30th. More performers will be announced in the coming weeks.

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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