The All Folk'd Up Music Festival will be taking place this weekend in the Village of Montmatre, and some local talent will be taking the stage, like Karissa Hoffart, Justin LaBrash, and Micah Walbaum.

New to the music festival scene this year is Weyburn's Dan Cugnet, who will play on Saturday with his bandmates, Dion Hrynewich on drums, Todd Milleker on bass, and Forget's Morgan Turk on lead guitar.

"We're thrilled to be a part of it," told Cugnet. 

He said the four of them have only been officially playing together for a few months.

"We try to play together every week at least, so we're always noodling around and it's good to hang out and build chemistry," Cugnet shared. "We've got a long way to go before we're as tight as we want to be, and hopefully we can just keep adding a lot more songs to the repertoire."

"I think a lot of these summer festivals sort of have the same vibe, and that's just people getting out and being together and being outside and just enjoying good music and hopefully a real good variety of music, and I think that's what's so cool about All Folk'd Up is it's really diverse."

Weyburn-area talent will pepper the weekend, along with some well-known Saskatchewan acts like Teagan little Chief and Chris Henderson.

Cugnet said it's exciting to open up for Canadian music icons Headpins, and Streetheart. 

"It's a pretty wide variety of entertainment, and in theory, hopefully there's a lot there for everybody," he commented. 

Crowd-pleasing cover tunes are part of the plan for Cugnet and his band.

"I think the set we've got is a pretty good mix with a few covers that should be real favourites, and then some of my own stuff. So you play those covers, I think, to get people paying attention and listening, and they're crowd pleasers, but ultimately, the goal as a performer or a songwriter is to get your own stuff out there and for people to start to want to hear those songs too, right? So that's the fun of it, and that's the challenge of it, too. It's can you write a song that people want to hear again?"

"I'm as much a fan as I am a performer at this thing, so it's pretty cool," he shared. "If you'd asked me a year ago, are you gonna be opening up for Headpins and Streetheart, that definitely was not on my life bingo card, but I keep getting some of these numbers popping up that I didn't think we're going to so it's pretty neat."

He said one of the benefits of a music festival is that they allow for exposure for emerging artists. Many fans will go out to hear specific acts, and are introduced to performers they may never have heard of otherwise. 

"To get that exposure, you've got to play a lot of small venues to get that many people in front of you, and you get into some of these festivals and you know, you've got an audience of a few hundred or a few thousand, that normally might not have seen you, so it's a great way to get exposure and to to be a part of just a great event." 

Tickets to All Folk'd Up can be purchased online or at the gate. Find the tickets online HERE.

Follow All Folk'd Up on Facebook HERE.

Cugnet added they'll also be playing at the Riversdale Street Fair in Saskatoon on July 22nd.

FOLKDImage courtesy of the All Folk'd Up Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AllFolkdUpMusicFestivalInc)