Todd Swank: Rocking Hard & Sweating Harder at the 2026 Yacht Club Music Festival

July 19, 2026

Rocking Hard & Sweating Harder at the 2026 Yacht Club Music Festival

Rocking Hard & Sweating Harder

at the 2026 Yacht Club Music Festival

Todd Swank's Diary Update for July 19, 2026

Monday night started the week with an adventure alongside some of the Oracle Minneapolis team and our friends at Apps Associates: an Al & Alma’s dinner cruise on Lake Minnetonka. I hadn’t been on one of their boats in probably 25 years, certainly not since the Vikings made them famous with the Love Boat scandal. Our trip was much more respectable, unless something happened after I went home that nobody has had the courage to tell me about.

Thursday night we were supposed to take Sue and Ron Korkowski for a boat ride, but we woke up under a thick blanket of smoke from the Canadian and Minnesota wildfires and briefly had some of the worst air on the planet. Naturally, it cleared up by the time we would’ve launched, but we’d already bailed and redirected to P.F. Chang’s in Maple Grove. Nothing says fearless outdoor adventure like gourmet Chinese in air conditioning.

Friday brought Miss Sheri and me to our second music festival in less than a week: the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival on Harriet Island in St. Paul. We probably wouldn’t have bought tickets had we known temperatures would hit the 90s with a heat index over 100. My concert hair hats usually turn my head into a tiny convection oven in normal temperatures, so this one had my skull baking like a Costco rotisserie chicken.

Despite the fancy name, Minnesota Yacht Club has very little to do with yachts and a whole lot to do with bringing arena-sized rock shows to Harriet Island. Launched in 2024 by C3 Presents, the team behind Lollapalooza, it expanded from two days to three after its first year. By 2026, its third summer, it featured 30 artists on two stages with no overlapping sets and about 35,000 people expected each night along the Mississippi River. Not bad for a club that never asked to see my boat.

We went with our good friends Joel and Jen, whom we hadn’t seen since their wedding in Destin, Florida. They’d attended Yacht Club the past couple of years, and after seeing their Facebook photos, Miss Sheri and I decided they were having entirely too much fun without us. So this year we crashed their party, because friendship is mostly about letting someone else discover the fun and then inviting yourself along.

We planted ourselves in the middle of the park so we could see both stages, although one definitely won the battle for better sound and sightlines. I didn’t recognize most of the bands or songs, so it felt like a full day of waiting for everyone’s one big hit. Then Marcy Playground played “Sex and Candy,” and I finally started grooving. At my age, that’s less a lifestyle than two separate things I’ve been forced to cut back on.

We lasted about five hours before the heat finally beat us and we bailed before the Lumineers. I was genuinely disappointed I didn’t get to yell “Ho! Hey!” with 30,000 sweaty strangers, but that regret disappeared the second we reached the car and the air conditioning hit us. Turns out my favorite headliner was a Kia Telluride set to 68 degrees.

Saturday night I took Miss Sheri downtown Minneapolis to the Orpheum for something wicked. Unfortunately for her, I meant the musical. Neither of us had seen the stage version before, although we’d both seen the movies, so I was ready for a little Glinda vs. Elphaba action. Nothing spices up date night like witches, betrayal, flying monkeys, and a couple thousand people silently judging which witch deserves the better song.

Once the curtain went up, it was easy to see how Wicked has attracted more than 70 million people, earned over $6 billion, and collected 100-plus awards across 16 countries. That isn’t a musical résumé; it’s a hostile takeover of theater. Between the massive sets, costumes, flying monkeys and powerhouse witches, the hype suddenly made perfect sense. Wicked really was wicked.

Quite honestly, I really liked it. Like most musicals, I would’ve preferred a little less singing and a little more dialogue, but the story was excellent. I grew up fascinated by The Wizard of Oz, and Wicked fits beautifully alongside it while giving everyone’s motives a clever new spin. Highly recommended for anyone who, like me, has a 14-year-old girl trapped inside just waiting to be inspired.