After an opening day that felt electric despite severe weather chopping off the last 20 minutes of headliner Hozier’s set, this year’s Minnesota Yacht Club music festival returned for a sunnier second day Saturday.
Ticket sales had apparently been slower for Saturday — this was the only day out of the festival’s three days for which single-day general admission tickets were not sold out — but you wouldn’t know it: By late afternoon, Harriet Island Regional Park in St. Paul felt just as packed, if not more so, than it did Friday.
And an important update for fans of not only Weezer and Fall Out Boy but also public transportation: Metro Transit, which had initially said Green Line light-rail construction would last throughout the festival weekend, announced Saturday morning that they’d finished early and trains were back up and running.
To kick off the day after doors opened at 12:30, local opening acts Laamar and Raffaella commanded sizable and particularly engaged audiences. Up next, to a slightly more modest but still pumped-up crowd, Jake Clemons — who now fills his late uncle Clarence Clemons’ former role as the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band — showed off his killer sax chops and solo music with a hard-rock edge.
The day really hit its stride when California alt-rockers Silversun Pickups erupted onstage — and yes, they were loud, but not just loud. Sound mixing has been really skillfully done throughout the entire festival but especially so here, balancing singer Brian Aubert against the band’s powerful guitar work and Nikki Monninger’s show-stealing bass.
Pitch hitting for a sick vocalist and guitarist Justin Pierre, Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump, joins Motion City Soundtrack on the Crows Nest Stage at the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival at Harriet Island in St. Paul on Saturday July 19, 2025.(John Autey / Pioneer Press)
And despite committing the cardinal sin of St. Paul concert openings — “Hello, Minneapolis!” — especially as a local band that should know better, Motion City Soundtrack delivered one of the day’s most fun sets. Frontman Justin Pierre had to call out sick, and it was a bummer to miss seeing him at the band’s first local gig in over a year and a half, but the show went on thanks to a series of “special guest” lead singers.
The first of which was none other than Patrick Stump, lead singer of today’s final headlining band Fall Out Boy, who has also provided backing vocals for Motion City Soundtrack in the past and is set to be featured on a track on the band’s forthcoming record “The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World,” their first release in a decade.
Stump is a longtime Motion City Soundtrack fan, he said onstage — a feeling that’s very much mutual, as MCS guitarist Joshua Cain told the Pioneer Press this week — and he absolutely crushed it on their stage. After a couple songs, the group brought out Minnesota singer-songwriter Ber for two songs and then local band Gully Boys’ Nadi McGill and Kathy Callahan for a song each before returning to Stump. He closed the set delivering some of MCS’s biggest hits like “Everything Is Alright” and “The Future Freaks Me Out” with contagious energy and slightly punkier vocals.
Jam rock stalwarts OAR and Cory Wong paved the way for the night’s headlining trio, and though food lines did get longer during Wong’s dinnertime set, it was cool to see crowds still go wild for the local guitar pro’s funk-jazz sound amid an otherwise rock-heavy lineup.
Headliners Weezer, Remi Wolf and Fall Out Boy are up next.
(This article will be updated.)
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