EDITOR’S NOTE: For preview coverage of the 50th Utah Arts Festival, which runs June 18-21, The Utah Review is presenting individual or group profiles of artists, performers, entertainers and some newcomers to the event. The curtain raiser highlights the history of the Festival which is marking its golden anniversary. BANDALOOP, among the most prominent pioneers of vertical dance, returns to UAF for the fourth time, having appeared in 2005. 2013 and 2018. Once again, the Oakland-based arts company will perform on the 240-foot-high curving glass façade of the City Library, as part of a June tour in four cities featuring a work with ecological roots that will resonate with collective concerns about the Great Salt Lake’s ecological crisis, as the dance artists perform FLOCK while integrating company repertoire pieces including Downstream and its new creation, life || lines, all with an original score featuring music by four composers. Salt Lake Acting Company will appear for the second time at the festival, offering a sample from its upcoming summer show, The Gaslight Zone. Make-and-take opportunities will be among the most extensive in history, with Make Salt Lake as well as Secondhand Salamander which is bringing back the classic Mad Hatter project, and, of course, the Kids’ Art Yard. Urban Arts is offering its largest live graffiti mural installation featuring eight artists in four Festival campus locations, while a row of several other artists will be demonstrating their creative process in real time. Holdman Studios, based in Lehi with an international portfolio of commissions to create stained glass in religious and civic buildings, including a recent update to the Utah State Capitol rotunda, is offering an unprecedented series of free workshops for participants to create their own stained glass artwork. The City Library auditorium will be the home to the 23rd edition of the international Fear No Film program, with 84 short films on a slate of 15 programs, the second largest in the event’s history. Of course, dance, who wears the empress jewels in performing arts, will be represented by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Sock Opera Dance, and, of course, the ever-popular 1520 Arts, which will feature Trash Panda Drum Group and competitions featuring Sol Tribe as part of the Salt Open Styles Battle along with the Red Bull Dance Your Style battle and a collaboration with Utah Valley University’s ESPRIT in Rep Your Set Choreo Competition, with choreographers who specialize variously in hip hop, contemporary, salsa, reggaeton, afro, popping. Headliners this year include Digable Planets, well known among jazz musicians as well as hip hop artists (June 18); Yola, six-time Grammy-nominated artist, songwriter, and actor (June 19); Austin-based musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, who has been cited for creating new musical experiences tailored to each fan, ranging from Bandcamp-exclusive releases to hosting interactive scavenger hunts while on tour (June 20) and Rubblebucket, a band well known for its hybrid genre blend of psychedelia and electronic dance music (June 21). For tickets and more information, see the Utah Arts Festival website.
THE BY & BY (JUNE 19, PARK STAGE, 7:30 p.m.)
From Utah County, The By & By is a roots rock and Americana jam band, known for its high-energy live shows, its facility with improvisation, and songwriting for two voices which accentuates a soulful character. The band members are inspired by musical role models such as Van Morrison, Nathaniel Rateliff, Ben Harper and Dave Matthews. The band’s name is taken from a literary idiom which means, “hold on, we’re taking you somewhere.”
Garrett Sherwood graciously answered questions via email:
TUR: Would like a brief account of how your group started, was formed and decided to set out on its performing and writing music platforms.
GS: The By & By grew out of a long songwriting arc. I’ve been writing music for most of my adult life. My biggest project before this was Deep Love: A Ghostly Rock Opera, which I wrote back in 2011, took to the New York Musical Theater Festival, and toured around the country. It’s still performed annually in Salt Lake and Idaho Falls. But as I stepped back from performing in that, though I continued to perform as a solo artist, I found myself sitting on a collection of songs that didn’t fit a solo musician — big, frenetic, soulful songs that needed a full band to breathe. So I called up Chase McKnight, who I’d worked with in the rock opera and who fronts his own band, Queenadilla. We formed The By & By in 2023. After about a year we lost some members and went on hiatus, but we came back in 2025 with a new lineup, a sharper sound, and honestly a better version of the band. This second chapter has been about one thing: becoming a great live band. No rush to record. Just get in the room and make something real.
TUR: What is your musical training and background coming in as a performer and as a group?
GS: My foundation is songwriting, that’s always been the center of it. I came up through years of performing, writing, and producing original work, with the rock opera being the biggest proving ground. Chase is a seasoned frontman in his own right. And the musicians we’ve built around us in this new lineup are basically musical savants that bring real depth to everything we do. There’s complexity and range in this band that lets us go places a lot of bands can’t. We’re not a polished studio project, we’re a live band figuring out how far we can push it together.
TUR: Who do you consider as role models, inspirations and influences in your music and performing?
GS: My first real musical obsessions were Dave Matthews Band and Ben Harper. They brought the sense of a band that could be technically adventurous and emotionally overwhelming at the same time. From there I fell deep into soul: Otis Redding, Van Morrison — musicians who performed like something’s always at stake for them. More recently, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats hit me hard — that fusion of roots, soul, and rock with genuine intensity. The thread through all of it is artists who don’t hold back; who go all the way in.
TUR: If you were to encapsulate your musical style into a simple phrase or tag, what would it be?
GS: This is such a hard question and we’ve been internally debating this very thing. I think we landed on “Roots Rock/Americana with a restless soul.”
TUR: What do you consider the most essential elements of writing or performing a song for your group that not only resonates with your group but also with the audiences who have been coming to your shows?
GS: The test for any song I write is whether it can still hold my own attention. Whether I can fall into it after playing it a hundred times and still find something new. If a song I birthed from my belly can still make me curious, I trust that the audience will feel that and come along. In performance, we’re after big moments — we want to take people into deep water with us. The goal is a set that moves, that shifts in feel and intensity, that’s serious when it needs to be and cuts loose when it should. We have the musicianship to do something intricate, but we never want that to get in the way of just having a great time in a room together.