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Pitchfork Music Festival concludes its Chicago weekend with St. Vincent, Cat Power and a very strange squirrel

Pitchfork Music Festival continued in Chicago’s Union Park on a sold-out Sunday, with headliners including Cat Power and Erykah Badu on its final day. Saturday’s headliners were St. Vincent and Angel Olsen as well as Chicago’s Jamila Woods.

The festival reports it hit the park’s daily capacity of 20,000 both on its opening day Friday and Sunday — this after Pitchfork took last summer off and moved from its usual July dates to mid-September.

The late afternoon scene Saturday was Ty Segall on the Red Stage and then Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth fame on the Green Stage, competing with the cicadas in the trees above the Renegade Craft and CHIRP Record Fair. A breeze blew the park’s dust into little maelstroms. The cicadas lost.

Megan Slivka, of Madison, Wisconsin, sat on a blanket and took a picture of a snarling, taxidermied squirrel she’d bought from vendor Graveface Records & Curiosities.

“This is Susan, I just got her,” Slivka said. Susan had her claws out and was sprinkled with glitter. “I love macabre stuff. I have two animal skeletons at home.”

Slivka and a group of friends were attending for the full weekend despite rising COVID-19 numbers in Illinois. They bought their tickets when cases had been lower, she said, but regardless, “I’m ready to be a person again.”

Riley Knudson, also in the Madison group, said that COVID-19 was probably here to stay, like the flu.

“It’s not going anywhere,” he said. More vaccinations would help, “but it’s probably going to be something we’re going to have to live with.”

On Sunday, before the gates even opened for Pitchfork’s third and final day, the cicadas were back in earnest while traffic rumbled by. Outside the Ashland Green Line station, vendors hawked water. “We need tickets, too,” one called out. A sign across the street reminded concertgoers to “skip the scalpers.”

Inside the gates, festival carts kicked up clouds of dust. Shaved ice abounded, as did beer and sneezes, though with vaccinations or a negative test required for entry, the plentiful dust was hopefully the culprit for the latter.

Before music started, Ashley Wolfgang, 29, of New York City, gushed about Bartees Strange’s Saturday performance. “He’s going to be headlining someday soon.”

Wolfgang also noted Phoebe Bridgers’ Friday set as a highlight. “She was my pandemic album, so just hearing ‘Punisher’ performed live was just like, I was just crying the whole time,” Wolfgang said.

Shortly before 1 p.m., folk artist Tomberlin took to the Green Stage for the day’s first performance. “You’re so pretty girl, oh my God,” someone exclaimed from the crowd.

It was nice to hear an acoustic set at Pitchfork, said Hannah Kade, 23, after Tomberlin’s set. Kade and Vincent Perrone, 29, had traveled from Detroit for all three days of the festival. A highlight for the two of them: standing front row for Angel Olsen on Saturday night, right next to Olsen’s partner.

“She was singing the songs to her partner,” Perrone said. “It was a very intimate experience.”

On their agenda for Sunday? Cat Power, Oso Oso, the Weather Station and fellow Detroiter Danny Brown.

A bit later in the afternoon, Chicago-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist KeiyaA brought her R&B to the Green Stage as more concertgoers flowed into the festival.

A common refrain at Pitchfork: It was a little weird to be back at a festival, but things felt more or less safe outdoors, except when masks were scarce in crowds and they didn’t.

Andrea Riley, 43, was drawn to Pitchfork from Madison by a “really great lineup.”

“I’m a big live music person, and I attend a lot of music, but this is the first time I’ve really been to anything since COVID,” Riley said. St. Vincent was a highlight for her, she said. “An incredible show, amazing production.”

Live music has “always been something that brought me a lot of joy in my life and so it was hard during covid to not have that hobby,” Riley added. “So a return to that has just made me feel really grateful.”

SATURDAY’S MUSIC

Nikki O’Neill is a recording artist, an instructor at Old Town School of Folk Music and writes for Guitar Player magazine.

Saturday, Day 2 of the Pitchfork festival, presented a more eclectic lineup, with hip-hop, R&B, Americana, indie and heavy rock acts, and in turn, the crowd was more diverse. Opening the day were local acts Horsegirl and Divino Niño, as well as talked-about alt-rocker Bartees Strange, rapper Maxo Kream and Ghanaian American singer-songwriter Amaarae.

With her band Waxahatchee, the Alabama-based singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield brought a dose of twangy and rootsy Americana to the Green Stage. Since Jay Electronica canceled his set with short notice (being replaced by local electronic artist RP Boo), a large crowd got to check out Waxahatchee’s entire show before wandering over to the Blue Stage to see Faye Webster.

As fans hung out under the trees and overcast sky, Webster’s indie country and rock songs provided a perfect soundtrack. Even though Webster was the clear focal point of the show with her intelligent lyric writing and dry, detached melancholy, she gave her band plenty of room to stretch out in pedal steel-tinged soundscapes with grooving bass and drums.

If there had been any grass left on the festival grounds, Ty Segall and his Freedom Band would’ve burned it off with their face-melting garage-thrash-punk-sludge-psych rock from Southern California. Bringing the rare-for-Pitchfork looks of long hair, black T-shirts and Flying V guitars to the Red Stage, the band cooked up a bubbling caldron of fuzzed-out riffs, dueling guitar solos and bass lines from the abyss … and a sweet and soulful Fender Rhodes just to show that they will not be typecast. With every song, more curious people from all sorts of musical subcultures gravitated toward the stage.

Over at the Green Stage, the now LA-based indie pioneer Kim Gordon and her excellent band delighted longtime fans with jagged and snarling songs from her only solo album “No Home Record.”

At the festival’s medical tent, things were fairly uneventful, which is a good thing. So far, there had only been a few cases of dehydration, so the staff urged everybody to drink more water and not just beer or hard seltzer.

The festival provided another moment of decision anxiety, when Chicago’s own celebrated singer-songwriter and poet Jamila Woods took the Blue Stage with a full neo soul-inspired band and backup singers, and Angel Olsen entered the Red Stage with her band and string section. Without mentioning the 20th anniversary of 9/11 directly, Olsen acknowledged that it had been “a very intense day and a crazy world.” Her accompanying violinist and cellist brought a cinematic quality to the more somber music segments that followed.

Often compared to David Bowie, the headlining singer, songwriter and guitarist St. Vincent presented a highly dynamic live show. Even as she takes on Prince-inspired funk from her album, “Daddy’s Home,” or sings melodic ballads with a resonant pop diva voice, there’s no doubt that St Vincent is a rock artist. As she grabs her futuristic, gold-colored Music Man guitar and gets into theatrical soloing duels with fellow guitarist Jason Falkner, or uses her vocal mic as a slide to play pedal steel, she also challenges the ideas of what a rock guitar hero looks like.

Fans who didn’t have festival tickets peaked at St. Vincent’s show through holes in the fence, and as the long line of buses and taxis waited for the crowds to come out, a long and sustained guitar note soared through the night.