The word ‘festival’ has certain connotations. Sweatiness, long queues, high prices. Iowa City Songwriters Festival has solved for all of this.
The three-day fest, which ran Nov. 5-7 this year, takes place indoors across several venues around The Englert. It’s an intimate melding of music legends, music lovers and those eager to develop their songwriting craft. To top it all off, its proximity to the University of Iowa makes it walkable, with affordable bites all around.
ICSF’s second installment successfully recreated the magic of last year’s, with unforgettable performances from some of the best songwriters in North America, including many Iowa treasures.
ICSF Scholars
Iowa City Songwriters Festival’s raison d'etre is to treat the art of songwriting as such. To advance this cause, the festival hosts about a dozen aspiring songwriters every year for a hands-on, skills-building apprenticeship. The ICSF scholarship program seeks to arm rising songwriters with the tools and confidence to succeed, like what the University of Iowa’s historic Writers’ Workshop does for poets and novelists.
“We're really just looking for people who want to get better,” said Executive Artistic Director Brian Johannesen. “It's about the intentional act of getting better. And so when we are reading applications, we're looking for people who exhibit that spirit. We don't ask for samples of their work. The scholars don't perform. It’s an educational experience.”
This year, 17 ICSF scholars participated in workshops, lectures and one-on-one mentoring sessions with some of the biggest names on the bill. Win Miranda F was an ICSF scholar in 2025. After her experience last year, she decided to move to Iowa City from Las Vegas, enamored by the songwriting scene. She was invited back as a performer for this go around.
Thursday
The Black Angel hosted daily showcases of Iowa artists all weekend, all while simultaneously serving diners. The venue featured hometown troubadours Joel Worford, Denny Richards and Lipstick Homicide’s Kane Kyrie Edwards on the first night.
That led up to Thursday night’s central event, a conversation between author Hannah Bonner and legendary singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. Like some of the fest’s programming at Trumpet Blossom Café and The Black Angel, the talk was free and open to the public.
“For a festival like ours,” said Johannesen, “Having someone who's had the career that Lucinda's had and the magnitude of someone like Lucinda on the bill in itself is pretty amazing. But the opportunity to sit and listen to her talk for an hour with an incredibly accomplished writer of another medium really kicked off the festival in the perfect way. We started on the right note.”
At The Englert, Williams got personal about her relationship with her father, the music industry and more. Many left enlightened from the talk, buzzing as they walked to the night’s final stop, the Trumpet Blossom Café.
To start, Samantha Crain was a revelation. We thought the Oklahoma singer-songwriter was new to us, but soon realized we’ve heard her voice before in Marvel’s Echo and the FX/Hulu series Reservation Dogs. She performed a magnificent original track in Choctaw, as well as “Joey,” a song off her 2020 album A Small Death, which featured in her friend Sterlin Harjo’s indigenous, coming-of-age dramedy.
ICSF tapped this year’s artist in residence, prolific American songwriter Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, and the Minneapolis band Lifter Puller, to close out the night. The Minnesota-born artist really broke out in New York in the early aughts, and shared his more than two decades of songwriting expertise to this year’s crop of ICSF scholars for the weekend.
Finn closed out Thursday night at the Trumpet Blossom, taking the stage with just his guitar and playing several songs from his 2025 solo record Always Been. Almost all of Finn’s songs are from the point of view of a character, and the intimate setting, combined with the crowd full of songwriting nerds, meant he was really able to go into detail about the characters. He even read aloud from the album’s companion book.
Friday
Friday kicked off with another strong trio of Iowa songwriters at The Black Angel. Stephanie Catlett, Win Miranda F (both based in Iowa City) and Cedar Falls-area artist Joel Sires were a wonderful 1-2-3 in the packed eatery. All three were terrific and it was so much fun to listen to them rooting each other on and laughing at each other’s jokes. We were especially taken with Win Miranda F’s “Bless ‘Em All,” a response to Metallica’s “Kill ‘Em All,” which felt especially timely. They were followed later in the evening by distinguished Auburn folk artist Todd Partridge and his original blend of whisky gospel (a genre coined by Partridge himself!), as well as South Side Chicago singer-songwriter Nathan Graham.
Just a half-mile away, Olivia Ellen Lloyd lit up the dark James Theater, provoking laughter in between every song. Currently based in New York City, her Appalachian sound is twangy and passionate and, above all, authentic. After Lloyd, Dan Wriggins, a prolific hometown poet and musician, added color and texture to every lyric that came out of his mouth. He sang of lessons learned and connections made, and paid homage to headliner Lucinda Williams with his song, “Lucinda on June Bug.”
Everyone from the fest — plus more! — then piled into The Englert for performances from two powerhouse vocalists with mighty pens. Johannesen says the number of weekend passholders was a little less than 200, while about 550 Williams fans packed the venue for her performance with her band and a very special guest.
Vinton native-turned-Chicago staple Elizabeth Moen excitedly returned to Iowa City, where she’d previously studied and performed for years, to open for one of her heroes.
“I’ve definitely been really antsy this last week, just waiting for the day,” said Moen. “[Lucinda Williams] means a lot. As a songwriter, as just a person in music who didn’t give up and pushed through a lot of weird chapters of this music business. She’s genuinely one of my favorite songwriters of all time. She’s just a badass. She really made a name for herself in Austin, in LA, in Nashville. Wherever she’d go she’d show up with her good songs and people would be like, ‘Damn, who is this woman?’”
Moen has been working hard to release her next record, Fields on Fire, which is scheduled for release sometime in early 2027. She gave ICSF attendees a special preview of her long-awaited fourth album, playing five new songs, including the title track, as well as a special cover of Willie Nelson’s “Hands on the Wheel.”
Williams’ performance, with her top-notch band, felt like something the festival had been building up to since its inception. Her classic album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is a pinnacle of its genre, and she began her set with two songs from that record: “2 Cool 2 Be 4-Gotten” and the classic title track. The rest of her set was a journey through her back catalog, and she wrapped it up by bringing her longtime friend and Iowa City local hero Bo Ramsey out for a rousing encore of “Joy.” If you were somehow new to Williams and her music, it was the perfect introduction, and longtime fans were in heaven.
Saturday
The first half of Saturday was more of a symposium than a festival. Before contemporary luminaries like Mary Gauthier, Bill Callahan and Fred Eaglesmith hit the stage that evening, they made themselves available for panels and discussions.
In the ICON Conservatory, attendees observed panels of all kinds. Johannesen, alongside Aaron Lee Tasjan’s manager Erin Johnson and booker Ryan Joseph Anderson, shared blunt advice on the business of getting your songs in front of humans. In another conversation with Johannesen, Gauthier, who’d endured a century of struggle by 25, opened up about how discovering songwriting later in life helped her make sense of the mess.
Paige Samek, development manager for The Englert, hosted an NPR Wild Card-style interview with a trio of out-of-state songwriters: Olivia Ellen Lloyd, Creekbed Carter and Nathan Graham, leading to laughs and tales of touring. Wriggins, who performed the night before, moderated a stacked panel of revered storytellers: Alynda Segarra of Hooray for the Riff Raff, Bill Callahan and celebrated Canadian truthteller Fred Eaglesmith.
Studio One got in on the action, too!
Our very own morning host Erin Fuller looked back on two decades of bandhood with Kate, Katie, Marcy, Sarah and Nicole of the hometown group Awful Purdies. Celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, the all-women Americana five-piece, and pillar of the Iowa music scene, opened up about their journey and community-based mindset. They discussed the calculated release of their upcoming album, Begin Again, and performed some of those unreleased tunes at The James.
“Just start with one person,” Sarah Driscoll said, when an audience member asked how she could start a band. “Just start with one person you wanna hang out with, that you want to hang with and be around. Then the music will click, because you’re already clicking with that person.”
ICSF’s artist in residence wrapped up his weekend by speaking with Studio One’s Tony Dehner about his own career in a public forum. They got into why he writes in character and how much those characters are actually him using someone else’s voice. And speaking of 20th anniversaries, this year also marks two decades since the release of The Hold Steady’s Boys And Girls In America, and Finn was kind enough to indulge Dehnre’s questions, like, “Is there a Southtown?” and “Where did (insert line) come from?” It was a pretty incredible experience for everyone.
James Tutson, Annalibera, and Jeni Grouws were the last “in the round” trio to perform at The Black Angel on Saturday. They each began by reflecting on their time growing up in Iowa and breaking into the music scene, then eased the weekend dinner crowd into their performances with “more upbeat” songs. Each artist had enormous range, and their banter throughout made the show even more enjoyable.
Callahan was a one-man-band at The Englert Saturday night, armed with a bass drum, hi-hat cymbal and a harmonica rack around his neck. The man behind Smog dazzled the crowd with his deep, velvety voice. Johannesen says the pairing of Callahan and Segarra was “an interesting experiment for us,” putting two “connected but different” headliners on the same bill.
“It felt like both of them embraced the community aspect of [ICSF]. It made for one of my favorite shows I've seen in a very long time, where you have this kind of gravity that is around Bill Callahan, combined with that kind of punk, anthemic ethos that Hooray for the Riff Raff has, it was like we went on a whole journey in just two acts at The Englert.”
Wrapping the festival up, Seattle artist Groundwater (Dustin Busch) and Eaglesmith performed at Gabe’s, where the drinks and jubilation flowed.
ICSF 2027
Before Williams took the stage on Friday, fest organizers Cat Dooley and Paige Samek announced that ICSF will return in 2027, running Sept. 9-11. We’ll let this year’s artist in residence have the final word on the three day songwriters symposium's future as he sees it:
“This was the second year of the festival,” wrote Finn on Instagram, “And I predict that it’s going to keep growing. It’s really a beautiful musical vibe and I recommend it to any songwriters or music fans.”
!["[Lucinda Williams] is genuinely one of my favorite songwriters of all time," said Iowa native Elizabeth Moen, who opened for the music legend at The Englert Friday. "She’s just a badass. Wherever she’d go she’d show up with her good songs and people would be like, ‘Damn, who is this woman?’”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/55256ce/2147483647/strip/true/crop/4176x2572+0+106/resize/880x542!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fc3%2Ffa%2Fd67b28524a1f9b6c1cccedddad58%2Flucinda-williams-and-her-band3jpg.jpg)
