Tufts Concert Board announced last week that the sixth annual Cage Rage concert on Dec. 5 will feature indie band Lucius as its headliner, with musical duo You Won’t and English singer-songwriter Dan Croll as the concert's openers.
The announcement of the concert lineup was made through a scavenger hunt on Nov. 11, in which Concert Board hid the letters in Lucius’ name throughout campus and posted clues to the locations on Facebook. Each student who found a letter was awarded two free tickets to Cage Rage.
Concert Board co-chairs Samantha Berg and Ben Averill, both juniors, expressed confidence that the scavenger hunt would reach a wide range of students. They explained that the Facebook event for the scavenger hunt informed hundreds of students of the event.
“I think that this year’s [announcement] was pretty effective,” Berg said. “We had about 215 saying they were going to our event, another 100 were interested and another 900 were invited.”
Berg said she was surprised that the headliner was revealed within an hour of the scavenger hunt, with people participating in the competition in spite of bad weather outside.
The lineup for Cage Rage last year was announced with the release of a large Spotify playlist and the gradual removal of artists from the playlist until only the Cage Rage performers were left on it. Matthew Marber, last year’s co-president of Concert Board, previously told the Daily that their 2014 strategy restricted the number of students Concert Board was able to reach.
According to Berg and Averill, Cage Rage, which is held annually in Cousens Gymnasium, tends to focus on indie-rock performers.
Formed in Brooklyn, Lucius is well-known for their song “Turn It Around,” which appeared on their 2013 album "Wildewoman," according to the band's website. They previously performed at the three-day music festival Governor's Ball in 2014.
You Won’t, set to perform first, is a band formed in Boston and has toured across the United States and Canada since the release of its debut album "Skeptic Goodbye" (2012) according to the band's website.
Cage Rage's second opener, Dan Croll, is a musician who just released a new single "One of Us," according to the artist's website.
Averill and Berg explained that they began the selection process for this year’s artists over the summer, and booked Lucius in August.
“Once we had our headliner lined up, we tried to think about what kind of music would go best with them," Averill said.
The two started with a list of available performers in their price range, then added artists and curated the show based on the list.
“We thought that Dan Croll was a really good complement to Lucius, as more of a pop-y sound,” Averill said. “We’re trying to keep it within the indie-rock-pop genre and have each artist spread out with different sizes of sound.”
Berg explained that they wanted to have less of a deliberate emphasis on widely recognizable acts for this year's concert, in contrast to last year's Cage Rage, which was headlined by MS MR, with supporting acts Gentlemen Hall and STRFKR as openers and which sold approximately 1,100 tickets, according to a Nov. 15, 2013 Daily article.
Averill added that this year's concert will forgo the DJ set that was present in last year's concert, in response to student suggestions.
“We thought that having three live acts instead of two live acts and a DJ set was the way to go, based on what we had heard,” Averill said.
According to Berg and Averill, online ticket sales for the concert began Monday and will remain open for about three weeks.
Lucius to headline sixth annual Cage Rage concert
