N.J.’s answer to SXSW: North to Shore festival announces 2025 lineup

New Jersey’s North to Shore festival will be back for a third year this June, with dozens of concerts by stars of rock, hip hop, reggae, dance, classical and other genres, plus comedy and fine art exhibits, in Newark, Asbury Park and elsewhere in between up and down the Shore.

Headliners and other acts were announced during a kickoff event for the “N2S” festival at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Tuesday. They include Tina Fey & Amy Poehler making a June 22 stop on their Restless Leg Tour at Prudential Arena in Newark; LL Cool J’s Rock the Bells Festival, also at the arena, on June 28; Steel Pulse on June 19th and George Clinton & Parlement Funkadelic on June 29th, both at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park; and the jam band moe. at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank on June 21.

Other performers will include Mexican multi-Grammy winner Natalia LaFourcade; the genre-defying 7-piece ensemble Streetlight Manifesto; alt-rockers Third Eye Blind; Oscar-nominated writer and comedian Kumail Nanjani; the Felix Hernandez Rhythm Revue Dance Party; and screenings by the folks behind the Montclair Film Festival.

A full calendar of events is available at NorthToShore.com.

Mosaic, a publication of NJ Advance Media affiliated with NJ.com, is a sponsor of North To Shore.

Tuesday’s kickoff event was headlined by Gov. Phil Murphy, who devised the idea for North To Shore with New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy four years ago in a place where couples often conceive big things to come. The governor said they were inspired by one of the country’s best-known festivals, held in the state capital of Texas every March since 1987.

“Tammy and I literally woke up in the middle of the night and said, ‘Wait a minute, South by Southwest is an iconic, great festival in Austin and its environs. It’s been going on for decades," Murphy told a crowd seated on the stage in Prudential Hall, NJPAC’s main performance space. “‘Why the heck can’t we do something akin to that, in our own Jersey way, right here in the great Garden State?' And that was the seed of the early thoughts to do this up and down the state, not just in one community.

“I don’t want to get political,” Murphy said during a brief digression, but a distinguishing characteristic of New Jersey’s festival, like the state itself, is its diversity, a value “that we stand for.”

Though the governor is a performer at heart, having been a member of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals while an undergraduate at Harvard, Murphy, 67, said the couple knew that putting together something on a scale they envisioned was beyond “a couple of amateurs” like them.

So they drafted professionals, including NJPAC CEO John Schreiber, who MC’d Tuesday’s event, and got Newark-based Prudential Financial and other businesses to sign on as sponsors, with added contributions from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, a state agency.

“And the rest is history,” said Murphy, whose 8-year tenure as governor will be history itself come January, when he’ll have to step down after two terms.

Prudential Financial CEO Charles Lowery, who joined Murphy and others on Tuesday, is retiring on March 31. A running joke on Tuesday was that three speakers that day, including Tammy Murphy, would not participate in next year’s festival kickoff.

A more serious question Murphy raised but couldn’t answer was whether and how the festival would continue following his departure in January.

Tammy Murphy said a portion of N2S ticket sales will help “people who really need it” by funding food pantries around the state.

Community Foodbank of New Jersey President and CEO Elizabeth McCarthy told the gathering that her nonprofit helped feed one million New Jerseyans each month.

“And that is a number that, frankly, with all the changes at the federal level, we expect to go up, not down, in the coming months,” McCarthy said, referring to government layoffs, contract cancellations and aid cuts by the administration of President Donald Trump.

Asbury Park Mayor John Moor acknowledged the city’s long-established LGBTQ+ community and paid tribute to the Turf Club, a local venue that has been overshadowed by the iconic Stone Pony but has been a musical mainstay of the city’s Black community. Moor said the Turf Club has been closed for years but will reopen “very soon” thanks to a drive by local officials and volunteers.

“So I give them all the credit in the world,” Moor said.

Atlantic City Mayor Marty Smalls did not attend.

None of North To Shore’s musical or comic headliners took part in Tuesday’s event. That said, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, who closed the show, is an accomplished spoken word artist who provided an introduction to The Score, the seminal 1996 album by The Fugees. Baraka has continued to compose and perform throughout his political career.

The mayor is a close ally of fellow Democrat Murphy and is seeking their party’s nomination to be New Jersey’s next governor. And Schreiber praised him as a “practical progressive” who has overseen reductions in crime and homelessness.

Baraka said he looked forward to Newark N2S shows by performers ranging from comedian Jon Stewart to the hip-hop artists of Rock the Bells. In the current era, Baraka said the diverse, community-minded festival was “incredibly important.”

“Especially, to me, at a time when people think our society should be measured by how high the wealthy can climb, I tend to think that it should be measured by how stable the floor is for everybody else,” he said, “and how funky our festivals can be at the same time.”

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com