It’s easy to experience musical whiplash at the Big Ears Festival.
As you hop around Knoxville, Tennessee’s sweltering clubs and regal theaters, you may soak in jazz-funk textures at one show, trailed minutes later by avant-garde metal bombast. It’s certainly a high-brow experience not suited for everyone — but still, the four-day event never feels snooty.
What makes Big Ears work is that every act on the bill, from obscure indie artists to top-of-marquee heavyweights, feels connected on some intangible level. Everyone here is slightly unusual in their approach, and that also goes for the handful of classic rock artists who graced the lineup in 2026.
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Of course, “classic rock” is a slippery term — and it’s even more slippery at a festival like Big Ears, where genres are often stretched out like Silly Putty. This year’s lineup featured British psych-funk veterans Cymande, commanding the Mill & Mine’s percussive, horn-driven grooves. On the other end of the spectrum was Deerhoof, who bathed the same venue in waves of glorious dual-guitar feedback, disorienting drum patterns and chirpy pop melodies.
Lots of marquee guitarists would have likely appealed to the open-minded classic rock fan: innovator Fred Firth, who got his start in the ’70s avant-prog band Henry Cow; Gary Lucas, who’s worked with both Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley; experimentalist Marc Ribot, whose collaborators include everyone from Tom Waits to Elvis Costello; folk-rock giant Richard Thompson, jazz great Pat Metheny and Wilco legend Nels Cline.
But Robert Plant and David Byrne — who performed in separately ticketed events, with early access given to pass-holders — naturally commanded the most attention. And both delivered, in true Big Ears fashion, with sets that couldn’t have sounded less alike.
David Byrne (Friday, March 27; Knoxville Civic Auditorium)
Joined by 12 blue-clad musicians that snaked across the stage like a theater troupe marching band, Byrne alternated between Talking Heads classics and recent solo cuts in a set equally ecstatic, silly and philosophical. Even outside of the songs, it was hard not to be swallowed up in the cinema of it all — there was intricate choreography, vivid video backdrops, even between-song speeches that touched on everything from his personal living quarters (2025’s dinky but charming “My Apartment Is My Friend”) to the story of a girl who used to take LSD in a field near a Yoo-hoo factory (1985’s eternally strident “And She Was”).
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Few shows reach this level of communal joy. There were high-fives aplenty and miniature dance parties breaking out every other track, particularly when Byrne and crew — including multiple backing vocalists and percussionists — dug into the Talking Heads stuff. “(Nothing But) Flowers,” an underrated slice of arty worldbeat from 1988’s Naked, felt like peaceful rebellion, and the spongy synth-funk of “Burning Down the House” reached genuine catharsis.
Robert Plant with Saving Grace and Suzi Dian (Saturday, March 28; Tennessee Theatre)
Plant and Byrne’s vibes couldn’t have been more different. Byrne and crew reached a kaleidoscopic zeal, while Plant settled into a ghostly, dust-blown Americana atmosphere with his current band, Saving Grace.
But there were also obvious parallels. Like Byrne, the Led Zeppelin legend gracefully ladled out a handful of his old band’s tunes: a low-key folk rendition of “Ramble On,” highlighted by some gentle accordion and the frontman’s more restrained speak-singing; a menacing “Four Sticks,” featuring some of the group’s most dramatic dynamic shifts; and a largely faithful (all things considered) take on “Friends.”
Cora Wagoner, courtesy of the Big Ears Festival
But it’s fascinating how Plant and company — including singer Suzi Dian and multi-instrumentalist Matt Worley, who jumped around from various guitars to banjos — made the origin of each cut irrelevant.
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Saving Grace reworked traditional music, indie-rock (Low’s “Everybody’s Song”), Neil Young (“For the Turnstiles”), psych-rock (Moby Grape’s “It’s a Beautiful Day Today”), gospel, blues, even solo Plant rockers that would seem incompatible with this rootsy treatment (“Calling to You”). But it all felt cohesive — the guitar solos that touched on surf and Celtic music and rockabilly, the electric mandolins and baritone drones, the way “In the Mood” effortlessly wove in a vocal chant from Zeppelin’s “The Ocean.”
Just like with Byrne, it was the work of a classic rock innovator continuing to innovate — and in the perfect setting for such a task.
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Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
