Neighborly Soul on the Museum Lawn: TAE and the Neighborly Close Out the Garden's Big Weeks

The lawn behind the North Dakota Museum of Art has spent a month proving it can do anything — the hush of Sean Hayes, the roar of Cousin Curtiss — and this coming Tuesday it does the thing it does best of all: it dances. TAE and the Neighborly headline Concerts in the Garden on Tuesday, Aug. 11, and after a summer of songwriters, the series is closing its window-eligible run with a full-on groove band.

The format hasn't changed and doesn't need to: gates 5:30, opener at 6, TAE at 7, $20 general and $15 for members, kids under twelve free, food and drink on the grounds. What changes is the register. TAE and the Neighborly are a soul-pop and R&B outfit with an origin story too charming to leave out — a group of neighbors who lived on different floors of the same five-story building, bonded over baking during the 2020 sugar-shortage lockdown, and moved in together. Their 2024 debut, Self Help, is warm, harmony-stacked, feel-good stuff, and it is built for exactly this setting: a summer-dusk crowd with wine in plastic cups and no reason to sit still.

Worth flagging for series completists: the Concerts in the Garden run continues past our window to Aug. 18 with Minneapolis indie-pop favorites Bad Bad Hats — a genuinely lovely closer, just one week outside this archive's Aug. 16 cutoff. If you're pass-holding, don't put the lawn chair away after the 11th.

Here's the quiet significance of a booking like TAE's. It's easy to caricature a series like this as a folk-and-acoustic ghetto — nice songwriters, nicer lawn, everybody home by nine. The Aug. 11 booking is the museum showing range: it will bring a road-tested groove band to the same grass it gave to a whispered San Francisco songwriter three weeks earlier, and trust its audience to follow. That trust is the whole engine of a small-market series. Lose the audience's willingness to show up for an act they've never heard of, and you're left with cover bands and nostalgia tours. Keep it, and a Tuesday in Grand Forks can hold a Wisconsin soul band that half the crowd will be streaming by Wednesday.

So make it three Tuesdays in a row if you can. Bring someone who thinks Grand Forks nightlife ends at last call — this is the counterargument, and it comes with a grill. Dance a little. The lawn was built for it.

Sources: Concerts in the Garden | 2026 Summer Season — North Dakota Museum of Art; TAE and the Neighborly — official site; Concerts in the Garden | Summer 2026 — Eventbrite