Day One
You don’t get much respect if you say Kacey Musgraves is the artist you’re most excited to see, I learned on the way to Randall’s Island for the first day of Governors Ball 2019. After entering and passing a monument to the late Mac Miller, I headed to see the goofy, fun indie band Still Woozy. Dressed in a tacky, tucked-in white and blue t-shirt, lead singer and guitarist Sven Gamsky looked pretty much exactly how I thought he would. He and his small but scrappy crew played hits like “Habit” and “Goodie Bag,” as well as a sweet cover of Mac Demarco’s “Still Beating.”
Next came Hippo Campus. It says a lot that, despite the talent that performed after them, it’s still their song “Buttercup” that’s playing in my head as a write this. I was worried they wouldn’t be as good on stage as in the studio, but these Minnesota rockers had their set locked down, playing songs from their new album Bambi as well as older ones like “Suicide Saturday” and “South.” In a similar fashion to Still Woozy, they struck me as being too big for their time slot; a feeling I would end up having about many of the smaller sets this weekend.
