Annotating the Austin City Limits Music Festival Schedule

Last year’s ACL duel – Jack White vs. Neil Young – an issue mostly alleviated by two weekends with the same headliners (by Gary Miller)

Festival goers, get your itineraries ready. C3 Presents announced the schedule for October’s Austin City Limits Music Festival this morning, and for the first time in the party’s 13-year history, we’re tasked with sorting through two schedules.

Most of the differences between week one and week two of this now-two-weekend run show up at the top of each day, with local acts including Dana Falconberry, Bobby Jealousy, Max Frost, Courrier, and Aaron Behrens & the Midnight Stroll – the new project from Ghostland Observatory’s dynamic frontman – all holding down time slots before 1pm during the festival’s first run.

They’re replaced on the second weekend with the Preservation, Sons of Fathers, Whiskey Shivers, My Jerusalem, and Not in the Face. New York City duo MS MR supplants Berhens’ Sunday noon slot. Other switcheroos of note include Houndmouth and Luella & the Sun, Wick-it the Instigator, the Dynamites, Gourds offshoot Shinyribs, and Alanna Royale.

Both weekends’ scheduling conflicts that will likely afflict most attendees arrive late in each day, with such quandaries as Houndmouth or Okkervil River, Justin Vernon’s Shouting Matches and the Bright Light Social Hour, a somewhat local sparring of Divine Fits and White Denim, and Neko Case versus soul man Shuggie Otis taking precedence over more easily delineated time slot stuffings like Red Baraat, Phosphorescent, and Tame Impala; Muse and Depeche Mode (pick your grandiose British pop era); and Wilco and Passion Pit (pick your disheveled frontman).

Also worth mentioning: lineup highlight D’Angelo takes to the AMD stage the first Sunday at 3:30pm, just 30 minutes before local blues prodigies the Peterson Brothers step onto the BMI stage.

Most surprising to this music writer is the fact that festival organizers have tasked notorious party boys Fidlar with waking up in time for their noon slot Friday on the Barton Springs stage. The San Diego foursome, which played here earlier this year at South by Southwest, has made no effort to silence their affinity for procuring certain substances and staying up particularly late when they’ve come through town, so they’ll have to wipe off the hangovers and kickstart a festival crowd that’s still half asleep.

Full lineup and schedule here. Good luck to Fidlar, and good luck to everybody. Austin City Limits opens its doors in 72 days. The time to start stocking sunscreen begins now.