In 2007, the Desert Stars Festival bloomed in the Mojave Desert, offering a festival experience that was intimate, curated, and indie. I spoke with Desert Stars and Starry Nites cofounders Tommy Dietrick and Kerry Brown about what made S.B. an ideal place to achieve a similar festival.
Tell me about the inspiration behind the festival. Where did the idea come from?
TD: The story of Starry Nites actually begins back in the summer of 2007 and over 200 miles away from Santa Barbara in the beautiful high desert community of Joshua Tree … With Desert Stars, we set out to build a weekend music festival that was humble in size and yet grand in scope, a style of event that favored intimacy and curation over large-scale music festival culture … We even went so far as to intentionally blur lines between audience members and the bands. Starry Nites was born of this same fabric — the belief that community can build and flourish when the core of this thread is human connection and re-establishing our bonds to the planet.