It always rains at Soundside.

Situated by the Long Island Sound in Bridgeport, Conn.’s Seaport Park, the music festival perennially gets dumped on. Among the trash-bag ponchos and ill-timed tank tops, Noah Kahan, The Goo Goo Dolls, Greta Van Fleet, and Gregory Alan Isakov headlined the two-day event. In addition to these headliners, Fleet Foxes, Boyz II Men, Bleachers, and 13 other bands performed.

C3 Presents, the minds and money behind music festivals such as Governor’s Ball and Boston Calling, hosted this third iteration of Bridgeport’s Soundside Festival. In addition to rain, they weathered a PR storm when Foo Fighters dropped out at the last minute after frontman Dave Grohl had another confession to make. Widely celebrated as rock & roll’s “nice guy,” Grohl posted on Instagram last week that he had fathered a child outside his marriage.

That’s never good.

Despite reporting on these controversies, this Argus reporter—somehow for the second time—received a backstage-access press pass. I write to you in contractual obligation.

So on Saturday, Sept. 28, 50,000 people worth of traffic joined me in pilgrimage to central Bridgeport. Raised in farm country and armed with the audacity of youth, there are two things for which I will refuse to pay: parking and water. This year, after inching into downtown, a police officer told me I can “try and find a side street—you won’t.” I found a Hail Mary in the Church of Praise parking lot. God bless the Presbyterians.

“A Little Success”

I showed up six hours late (which was also true at my birth, by the way), because I had a frisbee tournament, then dinner with an old friend at a Szechuan place in New Haven, Conn. that was way too spicy, where I kept surreptitiously trying to blow my nose in their nice cloth napkins for an hour, which is never a fully satisfying experience but keeps one from draining oneself into their Fuqi Feipian—but I’m being indulgent here. Then I ran through the nighttime streets of Bridgeport while it rained and traffic was blocked, and I had my main character moment when I heard the Fleet Foxes’ harmonies floating in the distance.

And when I got to the festival grounds, I was anonymous in a crowd.

“Are you happy?” Goo Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik asked. “Well, this next song will make you miserable.”

He has been doing this for an improbably long 37 years, since he was 21, and over the course of their hour set, I’m left wondering just how happy these aging rockers can be.

“We’re an older band,” Rzeznik mused. “I don’t know when that happened.”

Rzeznik introduced their recently released song, “Run all Night,” an unbearably saccharine number about living life to the fullest.

“Don’t let your dreams die young, don’t let your heart go numb, cause all we got is just one life,” he crooned.

But still, it’s The Goo Goo Dolls…

The people around me wouldn’t stop talking. Who the hell were these people who paid $400 for a ticket and talk?

“We used to be indie rock, and then we had a little success,” Rzeznik said, introducing the band’s oldest hit “Name.” “And nothing will fuck your head up more than a little success.”

This is probably what he says at every stadium show.

“Thank you for keeping our band alive,” he said. And then they played “Iris,” and the crowd sighed with relief.

Kahan Back at the Top

After performing as an afternoon act at the Festival two years ago, Noah Kahan was back in the headlining slot. In 2022, he joked on Instagram that he forgot his wristband and was denied entrance at the gate. Now, our moms know that he exists.

“Personally, I couldn’t think of a better setting for my depressing, sad music,” he opened, referencing the rainy evening.

Kahan’s set was surprisingly uplifting, with highly rehearsed and choreographed line dancing. And maybe that first bit of stage banter is the only sentence that rang unique to Soundside’s stage, but the crowd ate up the kitsch.

In stark contrast to the Dolls, everyone knew every line of every song on Kahan’s setlist. He made stabs at locality (Vermont Route 108 signs flash on the screen behind him, and an old-timey map of Connecticut projects during “Northern Attitude”), but he’s a city boy now.

I heard an empty beer can get tossed to the ground, and when I turned around, the man behind me smirked and shrugged.

I considered the battle. I didn’t fight it. We can be proud of punches we don’t throw.

Thomas Lyons can be contacted at trlyons@wesleyan.edu.