New Music Festival Will Debut in Trinidad With a Dope Lineup

Like the fuzzy little regenerating legs of the tarantulas that call southern Colorado home, when the City of Trinidad loses something, it almost always finds a way to grow it back.

After taking heavy hits to its annual cultural offerings over the past few years – the Trinidaddio Blues Fest, the Chief Comedy Festival, and the Art Cartopia Museum and its appendage, the ArtoCade Parade, all ceased to exist – this tough little town on the New Mexico border will host a new music festival, the Fancy Spider Music Fest, which will debut October 10-12.

Named after those hairy critters that crawl across the area during their fall migration, this multi-cultural happening will not only showcase more than fifty bands from across the country, but also comedy shows, a “Creator’s Crawl” of the town’s many art galleries, outdoor yoga sessions, guided mountain and gravel bike rides, and whatever else the festival’s founder, Curtis Wallach, can make happen by then.

“We’re going to have some surprises,” Wallach shares. “I’m still working on some of the things we want to offer, like maybe guitar picks or something that’ll get discounts for folks who get a picture of themselves with a tarantula. We’ll keep adding some fun stuff.”

After hosting a music festival called the Honky Tonk Hodgepodge at the Cold Beer NM tavern in Maxwell, New Mexico, for eight years, Wallach – a longtime music promoter who also co-owns the hi-dive and Trinidad Lounge (aka “the Dad Lounge”) – and his wife and business partner, Suzanne Magnuson, decided to shift efforts to the town they've called home since 2021.

“We’d been doing the Honky Tonk for years with Tyler Breuer, the school music director at Swallow Hill, but after the pandemic, Ty wanted to focus on that,” Wallach explains. “So Suzanne and I took it over, but it was really becoming kind of weird that we were doing this thing 45 minutes away from Trinidad, which has desperately been in need of a cool music festival. So we did the last Hodgepodge in 2023, and knew we’d take a year off and then bring something to Trinidad.”
That something will kick off on Friday, October 10, starting at 5 p.m. and continue throughout the weekend until early evening on October 12 at venues official (three-day pass required) and unofficial (no pass required), with most shows all-ages. A full list of the bands is available on the website, but the roster includes Off With Their Heads, Dylan Earl and the Reasons Why, Ritmo Cascabel, Esther Rose Band, the Omens and Don Chicharron. (The couple created a Fancy Spider playlist on Spotify to help attendees narrow down their options.)

Wallach says that more than a hundred bands applied, and it was hard to choose, adding that if a band didn’t make the cut, it really came down to an attempt to have as wide a variety as possible. “So if you’re a folk musician and you didn’t get in, that’s because we already had a lot of folk already,” he explains. “The only theme was that, at least for the headliners and subheads, they speak to mine and Suzanne’s own tastes. There are a lot of Denver bands, a fair amount of New Mexico bands, a handful of Texas bands, and then from as far away as Brooklyn and the Pacific Northwest.”

The official stages are the Dad Lounge, the Stock House at the Marketplace, the outdoor space at Sister Blandina Wellness Gardens, Space to Create and the Well Hotel & Taproom, but many other local businesses that don’t traditionally offer music will also host performances. Entertainment will go until midnight Friday and Saturday, but only the ‘Dad Lounge and the Well will host after 10 p.m. The final schedule of events will be released about a month before the event.

Because downtown Trinidad is so pedestrian-friendly – and the official venues are clustered along Main Street and Commercial Street – it will be easy to pop in and out of shows throughout the weekend.

“We really modeled this off the old South Broadway UMS and SXSW,” Wallach says. “We want people to be able to park and then walk from place to place checking everything out. You’re at one venue listening, and then you walk two minutes and get to hear something completely different.”

There also will be a few pop-up day parties, and on Sunday, comedians Nathan Lund and Jeremy Pysher, both of whom live in Trinidad, will host a main stage comedy showcase. Simultaneously, CREATE Trinidad, the city’s creative district, is coordinating collaborative art shows that will “align thematically with the overall vibe,” Wallach says.

Meanwhile, the chances of seeing a real, live tarantula – usually the males, who are not really migrating so much as sprinting across the grasslands to have sex – are much higher in the more rural areas outside of town, and so the conveniently named Tarantula Cycles will offer rides around the town’s famous gravel and mountain bike trails during the day on Saturday and Sunday.

“People should definitely go check out the Wormhole Loop or Simpson’s Rest, or go to Fishers Peak to try to see them,” Wallach says. “They’re mostly pretty chill, but if you get close to them and they feel threatened, they get mad and unfurl and rear up on their legs. They actually are pretty fancy.”

Tickets are on sale now at fancyspider.net; cost is $110 for a three-day, all-access pass.