Backyard Sessions: The OK Factor + The High 48s!
Live music, outdoors, and musical guests!
We’re excited to break the OK summer hiatus with a Backyard Sessions show! Acclaimed bluegrass band The High 48s will grace the stage once again, after one of our highlight backyard shows last summer! Join us in O’s backyard for a time of of casual, intimate, joy-filled live music and conversation.
Here are some details you should know:
- We are asking for a suggested $10 – $20 donation with the reservation of each ticket. You can do this online, but we will also take a freewill offering during the show.
- BYO: lawn chair/blanket, beverage(s), snack(s)!
- Bring canned goods or non-perishable items to be donated to Community Emergency Service (CES)
- OR, souvenir t-shirts/sweatshirts are back this year! All proceeds go to CES. Click Here to order your shirt online! (We won’t have any in person).
- Join The OK Factor’s newsletter for info on upcoming Backyard Sessions!
We can’t wait to welcome you to another season of Backyard Sessions!
More about The High 48s:
Since forming in northeast Minneapolis in 2006, The High 48s have been making music that combines the soulful sound of classic bluegrass with a modern attitude.
They’re a band with one foot in tradition and the other in the world of music today, and one of the very few who can find an overlooked bluegrass classic in a song by M. Ward or the Clash then throw down hard on a standard by Bill Monroe.
The High 48s are also a band of songwriters. Here, too, they take a modern approach, heeding the well-worn advice to writers: write what you know. Their songs ring true to their lives as northern city-folk rather than an imagined “sweet, sunny south” of coal mines and dark hollers.
More about The OK Factor:
Playful and unexpected, new-classical crossover duo The OK Factor writes and performs folk-inspired music influenced by multiple genres, with an artistry that reveals their classical training. Cellist Olivia Diercks and violinist Karla Peters find great joy in defying expectations and delivering an experience outside of what audiences anticipate from a cello and violin combo. Organic and genuine, their original compositions feel both comfortingly familiar and uniquely fresh, and have been described as “genre-bending” (Julie Amacher, MPR) and “pure magic” (Wausau Pilot & Review).
The ease with which they write and perform and their passion for educational outreach has caught the attention of the Minnesota music community in which they live and work, as McKnight Fellowship finalists in 2026 and 2025, recipients of a 2024 Minnesota State Arts Board Arts Education Grant, and a 2020 Scandinavian Folk Arts and Cultural Traditions Fellowship through the American Scandinavian Foundation. Olivia and Karla invite audiences to explore music and cultivate a curiosity about its role in their lives.
