Behind the Festival: Welcome Campers

Welcome Campers is an all-inclusive adult summer camp music festival happening Memorial Day weekend in Camp Lenox in western MA. The festival is produced by The Wild Honey Pie, a music blog founded in 2009 by Eric Weiner which developed into a platform for music discovery through intimate experiences and performance videos.

The festival is now in it’s eighth year and after several years of fantastic, gender-balanced lineups, will be presenting an entirely female lineup in 2020. Bunks are still available here! Price includes food, drinks, lodging, music, and activities!

I had the good fortune of sending a few questions over to two of the organizers of Welcome Campers: Andrea de Varona, the editor-in-chief of The Wild Honey Pie who also assisted in booking the fest, and Sandy Irani, who is the head counselor and event manager for Welcome Campers this year.

This year, every artist set to play Welcome Campers is a woman or a group that features a woman. Was this a conscious decision or something that just happened? If it was a conscious decision, when was this decision made?

Andrea: Yes, this was 100% a conscious decision. I’d say the decision was made pretty early on after a few conversations between our founder, Eric, Sandy, and myself. Historically, the Indie genre has been dominated by white men but we’ve definitely seen a welcome shift recently with female and non-binary artists receiving more of the spotlight that they equally deserve. At the end of the day, genres and the kind of people who are usually associated with them are always shifting and expanding. I like to believe that the more knowledgeable and aware people become of the importance of inclusion, the less division we will see in musical genres and subcultures. After all, music is the universal language. It is one of the first things we created together as a human race and for that reason, it is one of the most profound means of communicating. It should be used to spread positivity, love and understanding, and that’s always been at the core of what we do at The Wild Honey Pie, and particularly Welcome Campers.

Sandy: Absolutely. We always want to honor the voices of people we’re inspired by and excited about and this year, it was important to us that those voices be female and non-binary. Inclusion is such a big part of our vision for our future and we’re always trying to find new ways to include different voices. It’s such a privilege to be able to provide a platform for artists to be heard and one we do not take lightly. We want to be as intentional as possible about whose voices we are amplifying. 

The Wild Honey Pie is all about music discovery, and the Welcome Campers lineup looks to be inspired by that as well. How do you go about finding up and coming bands to share with your audience?

Andrea: Music discovery has been at the core of The Wild Honey Pie’s identity since Eric founded the platform as a music blog over 10 years ago. As a fellow music discovery enthusiast, I don’t take my responsibility as editor and music curator lightly. I recognize the weight of the role—it’s so important to support small, emerging acts when they are still starting out with nothing but a few instruments, a laptop and a couple of hundred dollars to spare. When it comes to discovering new artists, I’d say there is no right answer. Sometimes, it’s just walking into a venue on a random weeknight and getting there early enough to catch the opening acts who just might surprise you. Other times, a friend might recommend an artist that they just discovered online or that someone else told them about. Most of the time, (at least for me personally) it’s spending long hours sifting through blogs, publications, playlists (Spotify or Soundcloud) until you find maybe a band or two you think really has potential. Sometimes that potential is instantly recognizable, and other times it takes a couple of listens to realize, “Hey, they really got something there. Yea, I’m into this.” At least that’s usually how music discovery goes for me, but like I mentioned before there truly is no right answer here. It’s so personal at the end of the day. Of course, I think The Wild Honey Pie has great taste but that in itself is biased so who's to say the right way to find the next promising artist. Those kinds of things are so tough to predict and so much of it really comes down to seizing opportunities and always being there, being ready for people to listen to your music and hear what you have to say.

Sandy: Ah, I love listening to other people talk about how they discover music—especially when the answer is so different from mine. Live music is my everything. There is just something so special to me about experiencing music in a room with other people. Nothing beats that for me. I have loved so much being on The Wild Honey Pie dinner parties team because it’s given me a new way to see live music and connect further. I get to discover new music through our events all the time and that’s such an exciting part of this journey for me. Also our whole team is as diverse in their music tastes and discovery methods as Andrea and I are but the one thing that we all share is that passion. We have been blessed to find ourselves in the company of deeply brilliant music lovers. We’re all out there listening to, reading about and seeing music every day all over the country hoping to fall in love with something new.

Welcome Campers is a very intimate space, with a capacity of only 400 people. How does that contribute to the feel of the fest? Do you have any plans to expand in the future?

Andrea: There is no doubt that the act of sharing music is intimate—showing someone a song you love is revealing something personal about yourself. Many of our most formative memories are often linked to a particular song, record, or musical artist. Everything about Welcome Campers feels like a childhood memory… like sitting in the back of your parents’ car with your best friend as you both jam along to your favorite song. Welcome Campers feels like the act of sharing music with a friend or family member over and over again—that same feeling ties the whole weekend experience together. Without the intimate space of only 400 people in a cozy summer camp, that feeling would simply not be attainable. 

The vision for Welcome Campers is about maintaining that sense of intimacy and human connection that is often sacrificed when a festival or music event becomes too big. For that reason, the only way we see expanding the event is likely by producing more weekends and more locations.

Sandy: I couldn’t agree more. Growth for Welcome Campers will have to look different for us. This is definitely an exciting time for The Wild Honey Pie and we have some really awesome ideas of what expansion might look like for us in the future. Wherever it takes us, we know it will be as intimate, unique, and thoughtful as the rest of our events are.

Back to what Andrea was saying about memories and music—music really does define moments and so much of what makes this event memorable is that every piece of Welcome Campers has its own soundtrack. Not only the live performances but Andrea curated the playlists that will play for the rest of the weekend as well which will be equally as inspired as our lineup.

Also—I love the sentiment of Welcome Campers feeling like a childhood memory; that’s exactly what we want people to feel at everything we put together. From Welcome Campers to our dinner party concerts across the country, our experiences are meant to be intimate and unique and to give music fans the opportunity to connect with their favorite artists beyond traditional performance parameters. We want you to have dinner alongside the artist who wrote the song you played on loop all winter. We want you to play dodgeball with the artist who wrote the song that helped you out of a bad breakup. We want to create spaces that allow for that genuine connection.

Are there other festivals you look to for inspiration?

Andrea: I would say rather than looking at other existing festivals for inspiration we turn to certain life experiences that we can all relate to on a human level i.e. childhood summer camp, ski trips, family vacations, haunted houses, school dances, intimate and warm summer nights with close friends and family. 

That being said, I think the feeling and dream behind some of the first festivals for popular music (i.e. the Monterey International Pop Festival, Woodstock and Newport Folk Festival) were in line with the central vision and sentiment behind Welcome Campers: bringing people together through the power and intimacy of music.

What are you most looking forward to at this year's festival?

Andrea: I’m looking forward to performing at this year’s festival. As a very new, up-and-coming act, my band Fake Dad is beyond thrilled to have the opportunity to play in such a uniquely special event with such warm and welcoming people in the most serene setting imaginable. 

I’m also very much looking forward to the bonfire and making s’mores—together those are definitely up there on my list of favorite things ever. Oh and one more thing, making friendship bracelets again! I’m actually still wearing the one my partner and bandmate, Josh made for me last year and I feel bad cus the one I attempted to make for him didn’t last nearly as long. So this year, I have promised to make one that will last the full year! Maybe I’ll receive a new one as well.

Sandy: I have truly been looking forward to getting back to Welcome Campers since the moment Welcome Campers ended last year. There’s a magic that only exists at camp that you can’t understand until you experience it. I love being immersed in the spirit of it all and being surrounded by people who truly LIVE music in the same kind of way I do. Building a community around music is what I find most rewarding about my role with The Wild Honey Pie. 

And of course—there’s nothing like the friendships you make at camp. I’m excited to hang out with our amazing team, to make some new friends and to see some badass performances.

Thank you to Andrea and Sandy! Welcome Campers is May 23 - 25, 2020 in Camp Lenox, MA.