If you hadn’t heard — the Flathead Valley was the place to be this weekend, for several reasons, as my colleague Mike Kordenbrock wrote in our Friday newsletter.

Among them: A star-studded lineup performed at Big Mountain Ranch outside Whitefish as part of this year’s Under the Big Sky music festival.

Headliners this weekend were British folk rock band Mumford & Sons, country rockers the Red Clay Strays and Kentucky’s own prodigal son, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Tyler Childers. Performers also included local Hannah King and Canadian singer-songwriter Corb Lund, both of whom Mike wrote excellent profiles about in the lead-up to the festival. Highly recommend giving those stories a read if you haven’t already.

Your newsletter author, Mariah Thomas, caught Childers’ set, along with part of Wynonna Judd’s and part of Noeline Hoffman’s on Sunday night. (Childers was a must-see for me personally. He was my third most-listened to artist in 2024, according to Spotify Wrapped.) It was my first experience at the festival, which has brought country stars to the area for the last six years.

Admittedly, I didn’t know Judd’s or Hoffman’s discographies well, but both were great performers. Hoffman’s acoustic version of “Purple Gas,” a song she released with Zach Bryan in 2024, was excellent. And Judd shined onstage, both figuratively and literally. She had sparkles shimmering through her red hair as she sang older country hits like “Love is Alive.”

But my main takeaway from the event, which may be a bit of a cliché: there’s nothing quite like a live concert.

Truly — festivals of this type are unique for their ability to bring people together, even if everyone there only shares an experience for a short time. That fact was something Childers himself took time to recognize during his set Sunday night.

“One of the most important things that we are here to do is to (be in) fellowship,” he told the crowd.

He encouraged audience members to introduce themselves to neighbors they didn’t come with — Blake, if you’re reading this, it was great to meet you — before bringing Judd out to perform a (fantastic) duet of “Way of the Triune God.”

Childers performed older hits like “Universal Sound” and “All Your’n,” off his 2017 album “Purgatory” and 2019 album “Country Squire,” respectively. A personal treat, in my opinion, was Childers’ acoustic set, which consisted of love song “Lady May,” “Follow You to Virgie” and “Nose on the Grindstone,” a longtime fan favorite that Childers recently released a studio version of.

Actually, “Nose on the Grindstone,” along with “Oneida” — another fan favorite that Childers has been performing since 2016 but only released a studio version of earlier this year — served as the lead singles for his upcoming album, “Snipe Hunter.”

“Oneida” is about a man trying to win the affection of an older woman, despite differences in music and movie taste due to their age gap. The studio version has quickly become a new favorite for me, and for others, it seems. A review of the song in Soundlink magazine nailed it:

“The arrangement rises in a way that mirrors the story itself: the feeling of falling, the rush of connection, and the kind of joy that sneaks up on you. It doesn’t overwhelm the song’s simple beauty; it elevates it.”

“Snipe Hunter,” Childers’ newest album, drops Friday, less than a week after his Under the Big Sky performance. It will be his seventh studio album.

After an insane weekend, it’s always a little tough to get back to the typical programming… but that’s exactly what we’re doing today, by sharing some recent Flathead Beacon stories. Let’s get to it.