The Dead Keep on Living

Quick on the heels of their successful Fall Run for the Roses comes news that most of what's left of the Grateful Dead will head down the road again when the roses return in 2016.

We expect that the band featuring three surviving Dead members and surprise guitar hotshot John Mayer will make additional appearances at a number of festivals next year. These likely include Bonnaroo, where we have added them as a replacement for Eric Clapton in our prediction post below, Outside Lands, a new and as-yet-unnamed festival in Queens' Flushing Meadows Corona Park the weekend of June 24-26 (not the Panorama Festival there the weekend before), and perhaps the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which will surely also celebrate the life and work of the late, great Allen Toussaint.

Autumn Leaves are Falling...

As we approach the end of the year and head into lineup announcement season, it's time to update our predictions for top US festivals in the first half of 2016. 

Several months ago, we heard that next year's Coachella festival would feature a big-time reunion among its headliners. We initially reported that that act would be Guns 'n Roses. Within days, we crossed that name out, replacing it with the more hotly-tipped LCD Soundsystem. As we suspected, however, we weren't wrong about either act. We expect Coachella 2016 to feature not one but two big reunions among its headliners. 

Without further ado, some of our topline predictions for big US festivals through next Spring, including the new Panorama Festival in New York City, one of several big new festivals whose debut we anticipate in 2016, including June's America Rocks in Rhode Island and the Arroyo Seco Music and Arts Festival at the Rose Bowl...

Coachella

Guns 'n Roses

LCD Soundsystem

Lana Del Rey

Calvin Harris

Twenty One Pilots

The Arcs

A$AP Rocky

Chic

Gary Clark, Jr.

Halsey

Jean-Michel Jarre

The Libertines

Major Lazer

Of Monsters and Men

St. Germain

[11/16 Update] New Orleans Jazz Fest
Van Morrison

Sasquatch

The Cure

Mumford and Sons

Wilco

Governors Ball

Radiohead 

Phish

[11/16 Updates:
A$AP Rocky
Justice
Of Monsters & Men]

Bonnaroo

Dead & Company Eric Clapton

Calvin Harris

Phish
[11/16 Update: Ween]

Panorama

LCD Soundsystem

Mumford and Sons

Firefly

Kings of Leon (making up their canceled performance this year) or Green Day

Mumford and Sons 

Florence and the Machine

[11/13 Update] America Rocks

Green Day or Kings of Leon

Hollywood Vampires

We'll leave our festival predictions there, but name a few more artists we expect to be active to one degree or another in the US in or around the Summer of 2016: Adele, Avicii, Beyonce, Coldplay, the Dixie Chicks, Drake, Ellie Goulding, Eric Church, Foo Fighters, Frank Ocean, Gorillaz, Iggy Azalea, Kanye West, J. Cole, Justin Bieber, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Metallica, My Morning Jacket, The National, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rihanna, Skrillex and Tom Morello.

Whether additional reunions will follow at Coachella or other festivals remains to be seen, but we will also name a few additional acts whose return next year would not shock us: A Tribe Called Quest [11/13 Update: We expect them to appear at one of the New York festivals], Fleet Foxes, N.W.A., Pavement.

Stay with us as the season gets under way!