A few months ago, I was perusing Pitchfork, the influential indie music website, and saw a list of summer music festivals. One lineup caught my eye, including the likes of Titus Andronicus, Built to Spill, Jeff Tweedy, Broken Social Scene and She & Him. I was lamenting the fact that all the best festivals are in California or remote farmlands, when I noticed with great shock that this particular festival was called Loufest, and it was going to be taking place right here in our very own Forest Park. And better yet, the dates were August 28th and 29th, so I’d even be able to go! I was floored and beyond excited that St. Louis was finally getting the cultural recognition it deserves.

I have attended a decent number of music festivals: Bonnaroo, All Points West, Sirenfest, even Hardfest—M.I.A.’s insanity-fueled festival on Governor’s Island, NY—and now that Loufest weekend is over and done with, I can say that it was easily the best-organized and smoothest flowing festival I have ever attended. The event consisted of 18 acts in two days from, as the website proclaims, “a range of genres including rock, pop, folk, and bluegrass.” Set up next to the sprawling baseball fields on the Central West End side of Forest Park, Loufest included every necessary element of a good music festival. There were merchandise stations for both artist and Loufest memorabilia as well as tents for local vendors featuring handmade clothing and jewelry. The food stations featured food from a variety of St. Louis restaurants, such as The Drunken Fish, Local Harvest, Pi Pizzeria and HWY 61 Roadhouse, and the food ranged—in typical indie festival style—from hamburgers to crêpes filled with pears, honey, arugula and goat cheese, to toasted ravioli, to vegan gazpacho. They also took sustainability very seriously, with recycling tents and cans everywhere and a free water station for people with reusable bottles.

The Loufest organizers did an extremely good job of creating the festival atmosphere, and that extended in a huge way to the music itself. The acts were set up in the best possible way: two different stages with alternating hour-long sets for each band, meaning the longest wait for a band to come on was 10 minutes—worlds away from that time at Bonnaroo when we waited from 2 to 4:30 a.m. and Kanye West still hadn’t showed up for his set. Furthermore, the wide-ranging genres of all the bands mixed well into a relaxed, yet excited, atmosphere. My favorite of the more obscure acts was Stephaniesid, consisting of Stephanie Morgan, Chuck Lichtenberger and Tim Haney. Their sound is a rich stew of Alanis Morissette and Macy Gray’s vocals with the Cranberries and Bat for Lashes’ haunting, lush melodies. They were one of the earliest sets of the festival, yet they gathered a large crowd of genuinely adoring fans.

Many of the lesser-known bands also won my heart by incorporating unexpected instruments into their sets: So Many Dynamos, who sound like a whiny-pop version of Of Montreal, brought the Funky Butt River Band on. The saxophones and trumpets were a great contrast to their sound, as were the violins and cellos in both Titus Andronicus and Airborne Toxic Event’s sets, establishing the intermingling of genres as a certain theme of the festival. Even Broken Social Scene, Saturday night’s headliner, brought the violinist from Airborne Toxic Event on to perform with them in the most uproarious and uplifting set of the festival.

She & Him was the headliner for Sunday night, and their retro, prancing prairie sound was a perfect bubbly end to the festival. They performed all of the crowd favorites, such as “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” “Sweet Darlin’” and “In the Sun,” even encoring with Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” as an homage to St. Louis. I still managed to enjoy myself despite Zooey Deschanel’s completely stoic expression throughout the entire hour-and-a-half-long set. In fact, I would have been impressed that she managed to never so much as crack a smile while jumping around shaking a tambourine, if it weren’t so strange and disconcerting.

The highlight of the festival was the solo acoustic set by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. He played quiet, delicate Wilco ballads such as “Sunken Treasure,” “Via Chicago” and “Muzzle of Bees” and old favorites like “A Shot in the Arm,” “Hummingbird” and “Jesus, Etc.,” and he even pared down some rockin’ Wilco songs such as “Casino Queen” and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” to match the setting. Raised in Belleville, Illinois, Tweedy got his start in St. Louis, and on a few songs he flubbed some words because, as he explained after, he was distracted by memories of home and growing up. That perfectly encapsulates everything Loufest stands for and why it should become an annual event: It felt like a real festival on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, or on an island overlooking the Statue of Liberty, but as I looked beyond Jeff Tweedy and his guitar at the buildings of the Central West End, peeking over the trees at the sun setting on Forest Park, I remembered with relief and happiness that I was home.

Write to Hannah Schwartz at [email protected].