“Everybody that I’ve worked with or spoken to about music in general has been really stoked on it and wanted to talk about it,” Wheeler says.

When a third date on the following weekend was added, that also sold out. Live Nation added a second date on Sunday with the same lineup, and that sold out too. When tickets for the Saturday event went on sale, it quickly sold out. Millennials and members of Gen Z who are hyper-attuned to potential cons posited that When We Were Young was a Fyre Festival–level scam, even though the poster indicated that it was organized by Live Nation, the world’s biggest concert promotions company. News about When We Were Young quickly spread across social media.

When Did Coachella Peak? A Ringer Investigation. “My phone fucking exploded that day,” he says. Nick Wheeler, cofounder and guitarist of the All-American Rejects, admits his group had a similar experience of signing on for the show knowing only that one or two other bands would be playing and then learning the full extent of the lineup shortly before it was announced. Oh shit! Oh shit!’ Then it was like, ‘People are gonna really, really freak out about this.’ And they did.” “I kept discovering like, ‘Oh shit, they’re playing. “I just kept looking at it,” says Shane Told, Silverstein’s lead vocalist. The vibe was as mid-2000s as MySpace and arguing about what emo actually is. The rest of the lineup included Silverstein’s post–hardcore emo brethren (Thursday, Senses Fail), crossover emo artists (Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World), emo-adjacent pop acts (Avril Lavigne, 3OH!3), and even outfits that have explicitly rejected the emo descriptor yet still get labeled that way (Bright Eyes, AFI). My Chemical Romance were billed as the coheadliners alongside Paramore. It turned out they were one of 65 names playing something called the When We Were Young festival. Then in January, Silverstein’s drummer and manager Paul Koehler received the advertising material for the concert and shared it with his bandmates, just half an hour before the rest of the world would see it. With little more information beyond that, the group agreed. It contained an offer to play a show in Las Vegas with My Chemical Romance in October 2022. Last fall, the long-running Canadian band Silverstein got an email from a promoter they trusted. And be sure to check back next week for our coverage of Coachella 2022. In anticipation, we’re looking at the event’s history and the festival-industry landscape on Thursday and Friday.

Following a two-year, pandemic-induced hiatus, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will return this weekend for its 21st edition, with headliners Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, the Weeknd, and Swedish House Mafia.

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