via Brandon Wenerd
If you were standing in the Redondo Beach sand on Sunday, May 5, 2024, you probably still have a little bit of PTSD.
Mother Nature, in a rare fit of Southern California cruelty, whipped up 50 mph winds and pulled the plug on the final evening of BeachLife Festival. We were abruptly evacuated. Safety first, always… but… we were utterly robbed of a genuinely stacked closing night that featured Trey Anastasio, Fleet Foxes, and My Morning Jacket. The phantom prospect of Big Red and Jim James crossing paths on the sand is the kind of kismet missed connection that still haunts the jam scene. Festival-goers went home cold, sand-blasted, and musically blue-balled.
One Redditor, PuzzleheadedChest995, summed up the collective whiplash perfectly on the My Morning Jacket Reddit, where I shared a video clip of MMJ opening up with “Off The Record”:
“Wuttt…. flew across the country to visit a friend for Beach life 24 and MMJ and Trey/TAB. Walked in right when a light breeze blew my hair and the speaker said to evacuate for wind…thankfully we also planned to get married in Hawaii a few days later, or stumbling by Incubus would have been the cross-country festival ‘highlight’ haha. This is a nice little festival, glad they came back 🙂”
Two years later, redemption arrived.
BeachLife is a beautifully playful little festival. It serves as an annual reminder of why life south of LAX is so undeniably special. The South Bay beach cities are its own weird, wonderful ecosystem, completely distinct from the rest of the country. We call it the bubble in the great Los Angeles region because you never want to leave it, thanks to the proximity to good restaurants and, of course, the beach itself.
Launched in 2019 by local restaurateur Allen Sanford and Pennywise frontman Jim Lindberg, the festival was born from a brilliantly simple fever dream: What if we threw a massive rock show directly on the Redondo Beach waterfront so you could stumble out of the ocean and right up to the stage? Seven years later, it remains fiercely Californian. It unfolds steps from the crashing waves of Santa Monica Bay, yet somehow it stays wildly off the radar for most out-of-towners. It is the ultimate localized, best-kept secret in the best way imaginable.
Where else on God’s green earth are you going to get the time-traveling gumbo of Duran Duran, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, The Chainsmokers, The Offspring, and Sugar Ray sharing the exact same Pacific Ocean zip code? Add in heavy-hitters like Ben Harper, Slightly Stoopid, and Grouplove setting the daytime mood, and you’ve got a glorious, unpredictable weekend of sonic whiplash and immaculate coastal vibes.
Destination music vacations have completely hijacked the live music industry lately. Every band on earth suddenly wants you to fly to Mexico and drop $6k on an all-inclusive resort It’s a great racket, and business is business at the end of the day. But there is something infinitely wonderful about getting that exact same premium, sand-between-your-toes vacation experience right in your own backyard… and then getting to sleep in your own bed afterward.
Despite a delayed start at the gates, Sunday quickly morphed into a beautiful fever dream. We got Dogpark’s indie funk. We got Sheryl Crow’s 90s alt-radio supremacy. We eventually got James Taylor crooning “Mexico” in the dark to open his weekend-closing set, with his son Henry also singing on stage.
But let’s rewind to how the afternoon actually kicked off.
The day started exactly as a South Bay Sunday should. We were treated to the quintessential LA daytime nu-disco bliss of Poolside. If you need a soundtrack for nursing a cold Japanese lager while trying to convince yourself the sun is going to come out, this is the band. They laid down the absolute silkiest covers of the Grateful Dead’s “Shakedown Street” and Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.” The afternoon serotonin was a-hittin’.
And then, the heavy hitters arrived for the cortisol spike.
The sky overhead was a classic, impenetrable sheet of “May Gray,” the coastal California weather phenomenon that forces you to shiver in the Hawaiian shirt you stubbornly refuse to cover up and throw on that hoodie you had tied around your waist. No issue on my end, because the ominous gray backdrop was the perfect canvas for what My Morning Jacket was about to do to us.
When Jim James finally stepped up to the microphone, he was staring us down through a pair of Pit Viper‘s new heart-shaped “Admirer” sunglasses. Absolute rockstar power move. There was a palpable sense of unfinished business. He looked out at the crowd. With typical wry understatement, he eventually said something along the lines of: “So glad we can finally play here and the weather cooperated.”
Then they went to work.
via My Morning Jacket
They opened with “Off the Record.” Jagged. Weird beeps and boops. Metallic clanky noises. Perfect. They let us know immediately this wasn’t a sleepy Sunday acoustic set. From there, they launched into a relentless 10-song gauntlet.
There was the sprawling, psychedelic journey of “Phone Went West” beautifully bleeding into George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” We got the undeniable majesty of “Golden” and “Mahgeetah.”
But the ghosts of 2024 were fully banished during the closing one-two punch. Armed with a brand-new, hypnotic lighting rig that cut through the marine layer like a pulsating UFO, the brooding build of “Victory Dance” gave way to “Circuital.” Then they hit the gas. They closed out their set with “Dancefloors.”
My Morning Jacket absolutely ripped at Beach Life pic.twitter.com/7N04IA4rx6
— brandon wenerd (@brandonwenerd) May 4, 2026
I see an absurd amount of live music. But it had been a minute since I last worshipped at the altar of Jim James. Summer of 2017 at Merriweather Post Pavilion, to be exact. Nine years is entirely too long to go without letting this band completely scramble your brain. Sure, their albums are wonderful sonic voyages in their own right, but the live experience is unmatched, even in a truncated festival setting. The sheer sonic squall they unleashed against that gray Pacific backdrop as dusk gave way to dark was something else entirely.
We waited two years for them to play the Redondo sand. They delivered. Finally, the debt is paid.
If you missed this particular set on the beach, don’t panic. The Jacket is keeping the momentum rolling into the fall and winter. They just announced an absurd, seven-night, no-repeats residency at The Fillmore in San Francisco this October, where each night’s setlist will be dictated by a different color of the rainbow. And if that’s not enough to empty your wallet, they also just dropped the dates for the 2027 return of One Big Holiday, their all-inclusive destination rager taking over the Hard Rock Hotel in Riviera Maya, Mexico from January 14-18.
Start making your travel plans now.
And maybe buy some heart-shaped sunglasses to aura-farm your inner-Jim James while you’re at it.