Kresge in the Pines: Interlochen's Summer Slate Is the Best Bill in Northern Michigan

Tonight the summer's marquee opens in earnest: David Foster and Katharine McPhee bring their "Intimate Evening" to Kresge Auditorium at Interlochen on Friday, July 10, the 16-time Grammy winner at the piano and McPhee out front, tickets listed around $75. It is a genteel start to a festival that gets a great deal louder before August is out.

The Interlochen Arts Festival slate is, top to bottom, the strongest touring lineup the region will see all year, and it is worth reading the whole thing at once. Emmylou Harris and Graham Nash share a stage — "Two Legends, One Legendary Evening" — on July 23. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit follow on July 24 (tickets around $82), the finest working songwriter in American roots music playing a hall that will actually shut up and listen. Brit Floyd hauls in the Pink Floyd spectacle on July 27, Jefferson Starship on July 29, and — deep in our window's home stretch — a blockbuster Joe Bonamassa and Gov't Mule double bill on August 14. Interlochen announced Jefferson Starship and the Bonamassa/Mule show as its first two on-sales back in February; the rest filled in across the spring.

What makes Kresge special isn't the names — plenty of sheds book these acts. It's the setting. This is a nearly century-old arts camp in the woods between two lakes, where the touring pro on stage is very likely to be surrounded, backstage and in the audience, by teenagers who are frighteningly good at their instruments. The hall itself is unglamorous and acoustically fair, the kind of room where a quiet Emmylou Harris ballad lands without a single bar clink to fight through.

Here's the why-it-matters turn. A festival like this is a subsidy the whole scene lives off. Interlochen's programming pulls national press and national audiences to a rural county, and that gravity keeps the wineries, the downtown rooms, and the local openers in business. When Isbell sells out a hall in the pines, the ripple reaches every patio show within an hour's drive.

Buy for the one you can't miss, get there early enough to walk the campus, and do not talk during the ballads. The ushers — and roughly a thousand conservatory kids — are watching.

Sources: David Foster & Katharine McPhee — 07-10-2026 | Interlochen; Interlochen Announces First Two Summer Concerts | The Ticker; Emmylou Harris, Stray Cats & more: Interlochen 2026 | Local Spins