By the last week of September the wind on Northerly Island has turned and comes off the water cold enough that the people on the lawn keep their jackets on through the headliner. Foster The People played the pavilion on Saturday September 26th, which was effectively the end of the lakefront season.
They have been a band since 2009 and have spent most of that time in the shadow of one enormous single. Nobody on that field was pretending otherwise.
Goth Babe opened, which is a sensible piece of routing — a one-man outdoors-branded project playing to a crowd that came for a band whose whole aesthetic is sunshine. The run sheet taped up backstage listed the night plainly as Foster The People Live in Concert, which is the least romantic document in live music and the most honest.
What Sixteen Years Does To A Set
The problem with a catalogue built on one inescapable song is that the set has to be arranged around it rather than toward it. They solved it by putting the newer material early, while the field was still arriving and more forgiving.
"Pumped Up Kicks" is the song everybody came for and it has aged into something stranger than it was — a whistled hook over a lyric about a school shooting, sung back by a lawn full of people who were children when it charted. "Sit Next to Me" was the better live performance and got a fraction of the response. Newer material off the Glare cycle sat in the middle and was received politely.
From the field, September 26
A Shed That Closes In September
Northerly Island is a peninsula of landfill dredged into the lake under Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan, used as Meigs Field until 2003, and now a park with a 30,000-capacity shed on it. The season runs May to late September for a reason that has nothing to do with programming: by October the wind across open water makes an outdoor show on a lakefill unsellable.
Which gives the last date of the season a particular quality. The low end goes into the lake, as it does all summer, and the vocal has to carry the whole thing — but in late September the crowd is denser toward the front because everybody has worked out that the back of the lawn is colder.
Twenty slides from the night, with Goth Babe
Closing night of the season
A fan photographed the venue run sheet before the doors opened and posted it. That piece of paper was the last one Northerly Island printed in 2026.
Cover image: Foster The People