This weekend, a popular music festival is coming to Toronto and bringing with it a lineup of talent you won’t want to miss.
The inaugural All Things Go festival will be taking over Budweiser Stage for a two-day affair, running from Oct. 4-5 with a lineup chock full of talented artists, from headliners Reneé Rapp and Kacey Musgraves to other heavy hitters, including (but definitely not limited to) Remi Wolf, Role Model, Charlotte Cardin, and Ravyn Lenae.
Festival co-founder Stephen Vallimarescu says that what makes All Things Go unique is that it is rooted in community.
“All Things Go, at a very high level, is a music festival, but once you peel that back, it’s a community, and I think the artists and the fans are very much part of that community,” he told Now Toronto. “That’s really the engine that drives All Things Go.”
Lizzy Plapinger, a curation and lineup consultant on the All Things Go team, believes that the unique lineups, centring queer and female artists, is part of what makes the festival series so special.
“Early on, Steven brought me and Maggie Rogers on to program a weekend for [All Things Go], and it was an all-female lineup, and that resonated so hard, I think, with the audience, for me as a performer, for Maggie,” Plapinger told Now Toronto on Wednesday.
The curator, who is also an artist and was lead vocalist of the pop duo MS MR, shares that while she’s played festivals all over the world, this series is special.
“It wasn’t unlikely [at that time] that I would sometimes be one of two other women on a bill. It was… pretty groundbreaking to be at an event that was so heavily female programmed, politically minded and LGBTQ forward.”
Read More
She then joined the team in a more permanent capacity, helping to design events that are centred on community, and supporting both women and queer artists. Both Plapinger and Vallimarescu explained that in the current political climate, and with an ongoing lack of funding for the arts, it is incredibly important to keep that momentum going.
“It feels like this [is a] very amazing and rare and unique opportunity to be like, ‘We have our own money, we have our own plan, and we can support these artists,’ and also to show that there is a demand and want for it,” Plappinger said.
“Just to exist as the festival is an act of rebellion, an act of an act of resistance, and also in a bid for joy. Something that I deeply believe in is joy rebellion, and what an amazing way to have this festival represent that on such a manifested level.”
ALL THINGS GO: FROM WASHINGTON D.C. TO TORONTO
The inaugural Toronto festival follows an 11-year run which started in Washington, D.C. back in 2014, before its programming expanded to New York in 2024. The Toronto edition of the popular festival comes after the team behind All Things Go spent years on what Vallimarescu calls a “road show,” where they toured different cities and venues, trying to find a spot that aligned with the type of experience they want All Things Go to be.
“We felt like there could be a real opportunity [in Toronto] to create an experience for artists and fans that is similar to what we feel like the magic in DC and New York [is],” he explained.
The festival is thoughtfully designed, featuring a single stage, meaning that there are no overlapping performances throughout the festival. Vallimarescu says that these events are less about Instagrammable moments, and more about community and music.
“We invest very little in VIP or over the top experiential [things]. We are not like Coachella, where it’s about a photo in front of a ferris wheel, and it’s because the fans truly don’t care, like they come and they just go to the stage and they’re standing there all day to watch music,” the founder explained.
“It’s very much just about the music and figuring out how we can elevate the musical experience and spend more money on artists versus spending more money on bells and whistles that really, I don’t think, impact the overall experience of the festival.”
You can find out more about All Things Go Toronto here, and purchase tickets for the festival here.
By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
