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Osheaga founder Nick Farkas says the lineup for the 2019 edition is all about staying true to your roots. That means going for big-ticket headliners The Lumineers, The Chemical Brothers and Childish Gambino but also making sure that the names in smaller print on the official poster are just as exciting. And they are.

So Canada’s leading music festival will also be shining the spotlight this summer on Janelle Monae, Tame Impala, Dean Lewis, Jessie Reyez, Sharon Van Etten, Gucci Mane, Mitski, Interpol, Kurt Vile, City and Colour, Kaytranada, Beach House, Hozier, Metric, and Mac DeMarco, among many others.

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“For us we’ve always tried to be true to what we want to be, which is a music festival first,” said Farkas, vice-president of concerts at Evenko, in a phone interview Tuesday morning. “We’ve wanted to appeal to as many different people as possible and never really get pigeon-holed in one direction or another. You look at what’s been coming out this year … Ariane Grande at Coachella and Lollapalooza. There’s more of a pop sensibility to what a lot of the (festivals) are doing. We try to play to what we think our core audience is going to be. When you start with Ben Harper and Sonic Youth as your two extremes in your very first year, we continually want to play (with the idea) that anything is possible. Like adding a J Balvin this year. Latin music is a huge thing so we want to try that. See how it flies with our audience. From the start, we’ve never wanted to only be about headliners. We wanted to be about the strength of the lineup from top to bottom and look at what artists are out there that we’re getting excited by, not just necessarily the most popular artists in the market at that time.”