“I’ve only wanted to play here since I was, I don’t know, 14,” Lana Del Rey told the crowd at the end of her main-stage Newport debut, which included nods to her family’s Rhode Island lineage and a callback to last year’s festival as she dusted off her cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free.” The bulk of her performance, with its comparatively elaborate production design and smattering of dancers, was a condensed version of her current festival set, which collates highlights from her recent records (“Bartender,” “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”) and early hits like “Video Games” and “Summertime Sadness.” She invited friends and collaborators Nikki Lane and Jack Antonoff onstage for several songs, and ended with a stirring take on “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing For a Woman Like Me to Have — but I Have It.” “We could leave you on a high note,” Del Rey joked before introducing that song, “but we would never do that.”
The 2023 edition of Newport Folk Festival wrapped up on Sunday (7/30) at Fort Adams Park. Billy Strings closed out the weekend, and while his set didn’t feature any big surprise guests of the sort the festival has been known for, a little earlier Lana Del Rey brought out Nikki Lane for “Breaking Up Slowly,” and Jack Antonoff for “Mariners Apartment Complex” and a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free.” Watch video of all three below.
Los Lobos brought out Neko Case, Nels Cline of Wilco, and John McCauley of Deer Tick for their set, and Sunday also featured the “Folk Family Revue” with Robert Ellis, Beau Bedford, Phil Cook, Valerie June, Electric Mayhem bassist and Muppet Floyd Pepper, and Abraham Alexander (who also performed a set of his own); Gregory Alan Isakov; M. Ward; Remi Wolf; Mereba; Madison Cunningham; Senora May; and more. See pictures by Emilio Herce and Toby Tenenbaum below.
