Country Lakeshake 2018

2 Jul, 2018 John Kosiewicz Concert Reviews, Country

Dierks Bentley - Photo credit: John Kosiewicz

In its fourth year, Country LakeShake Festival continues to get better and make its mark on Chicago. From June 22-24, 2018, despite the cold, wet and windy first day, LakeShake had its most successful year yet, with the highest attendance ever. Once again, Chicago with the scenic Lake Michigan shores and skyline backdrop, hosted the three-day festival at Huntington Bank Pavilion on Northerly Island. With two stages, a Main Stage and a Next from Nashville Stage, country music was heard all weekend long.

Here are our Top Five Best Things About 2018 Country LakeShake Festival:

LakeShake Staff: With lots of rain during the day prior to and first day of the festival, organizers of the country festival went to extraordinary measures to attempt to keep ahead of the dousing that Mother Nature had delivered to the Chicago area. An unprecedented measure was attempted by bringing in 100,000 square foot of field turf which was placed over the lawn area. In addition, they purchased 100 wet vacs to suck up the water that was puddling. Also, staff could be found sweeping, squeegeeing, mopping and vacuuming the water, doing whatever it took to make their audience comfortable once the gates opened for day one.

Main Stage: Blake Shelton, Dierks Bentley and Florida Georgia Line! With three of the biggest names in country music, it’s worth the price of admission.

Openers a plenty: Count them, (and you’ll need two hands because you can’t count them on one hand) 10 openers on Friday and 9 openers on both Saturday and Sunday. Now that’s a lot of country music.

Opry Circle: Pop-up acoustic performances by performers of both main stage and Next from Nashville Stage.

Friday: LoCash, Tracy Lawrence and RaeLynn
Saturday: Delta Rae, Jackie Lee, Charlie Worsham, Dillon Carmichael

Covers, covers and more covers (here are just a few examples):

Jackie Lee covering Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down”
During Dierks Bentley’s performance of “5150,” he brought Brandon of Lanco out who had a little too much fun singing John Michael Montgomery’s song, “Sold [The Grundy County Auction Incident]”. Jokingly, Bentley commented, “… came out here and totally destroyed my show,” then rolled back in to finish “5150.”
Chris Lane with his 1990’s montage of country hits including “Watermelon Crawl” by Tracy Byrd and ending with “Friends in Low places”. As he stated, “God bless the 1990s.”
Cole Swindell covered Tim McGraw’s song, “I like it, I love it”

Other great moments from 2018: Although we listed the five main things we loved about this years 2018, felt we needed to mention these specific moments as well.

Chris Lane brought the energetic Morgan up from the audience to serenade to her, “All About You.”
Dierks Bentley shared the story about how earlier that day he met and was inspired by combat medic, John, and dedicated the song “Riser” to him.
Florida Georgia Line singing “Dirt” to the service men and women risk their lives for our safety and freedom.
Florida Georgia Line singing with Michael Hardy, the song writer of “Up Down”
The big “L S” letters were a hit for picture taking

In all, it was a great country weekend in Chicago. We’ll be looking for details on the upcoming 5^th annual Country LakeShake Festival’s in 2019! Be sure to check out the official website at: lakeshakefestival.com

Also, follow LakeShake at:

Don’t forget to join the conversation on Twitter, using #LakeShakeFest.