Orlando Congressman Maxwell Frost speaks on the return of his MadSoul Festival

U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost Credit: Mauricio Murillo

Despite what could understatedly be termed an “eventful” year in Washington, D.C., Orlando’s U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost is still bringing back his MadSoul Music & Arts Festival to the Orlando Amphitheater this time on Saturday, Dec. 6.

With a powerhouse lineup of music — Magdalena Bay, Cuco, Aly & AJ are the headliners — and speakers — U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Florida Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones and more — this promises to be a beautiful day of music and advocacy. Orlando Weekly spoke to Rep. Frost about curating the lineup, learning lessons from the first at times tumultuous year of the festival, and using this platform to provide concertgoers with resources for direct action and civic engagement.

Orlando Weekly: Talk to me a little bit about picking the headliners for this year’s fest.

Frost: We really wanted to think through ways that we could highlight either artists who have a connection to Florida or from the South generally, or to one of the issues that we care about. That’s kind of the starting basis for a lot of the lineup. Magdalena Bay was an artist that was always on the list of people we wanted to hit up. I’m a big fan of theirs. They put out my favorite album in the last year and they’re from Miami. We also wanted to book an artist that could bring in a lot of people, but that was still seen as coming up, in a way. We reached out to them about it and we’re really happy to confirm them.

Aly & AJ are very interesting. I met them at a gun violence prevention event a couple years ago, and asked them why they were there. They actually had survived an instance of gun violence; there was a drive-by shooting that happened while they were on tour, their bus got shot up. And they released a song called “Sirens” about gun violence. They’ve been big advocates, and I’ve done multiple things with them, and so they were more than happy to come down to do the event. It’s a very similar thing with Cuco, who I met, and realized he was really into immigration work and really fighting ICE. And when he heard that we were going to be supporting local immigration groups, he was more than happy to come and be a part of it.

The Ren is probably the most different booking that we’ve done. They’ve fallen on really hard times with what’s going on with their building. I thought, what would be cooler than to uplift what they’re going through, also they’re just a staple of Orlando arts, music and culture. I called Donald [Rupe] and I said, “I’d love the Ren to do a set.” He asked, “What do you guys want us to do?” I was like, “I just want you to do the Ren on the MadSoul stage.”

I wanted to speak to you about the speaker lineup. There’s some big names on there, like Rep. Ayanna Pressley …

Ayanna was someone that, even right after last year’s MadSoul, I knew I wanted to ask her to come and be a part of it. She was actually one of the first people I reached out to kind of be our, I don’t know, like our lead speaker for this year. We’re so happy to have her.

I thought really closely about a lot of the issues that are top of mind for people, and wanted to invite people that can speak to things relating to that. Delia Ramirez is one of my closest friends in Congress, and she’s an amazing advocate. She’s someone who has been really on the front lines of fighting ICE and of what’s going on with immigration right now. She’s also the sponsor of the Block the Bombs Act, which is a very important bill relating the atrocities that have been going on and the genocide in Gaza. Delia is coming to the festival, as someone who’s a leader on many different, really important issues that I think a lot of people care about.

Justin Jones, obviously, is a brother of mine. He was here last year, but I think it’s always important to me that we anchor the festival in Southern solidarity. A lot of times Florida isn’t seen as part of the South, and I really try my best to bring in young Southern leaders from other states as well, to tie that connection together.

So having Justin and also Anderson Clayton, who’s the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party — she’s actually the youngest chair in the country. She’s younger than me! But she is a bold progressive in the South, and it’s just going be great to have her.

A duo I want to talk about is Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis and her mother, Dr. LaVon Wright Bracy, who helped integrate schools in Gainesville, and has been one of the most foremost voting rights activists in a time where it was really difficult.

We try to balance MadSoul. The New York Times was at MadSoul last year, kind of polling people as they entered and they found out that 90% of the people who came, it was their first political event. And so I want to make sure people never feel like we’re talking at them or like preaching at them with 30-minute speeches, but that it’s more just throughout the festival. So this year, our second stage is not really going to have much music at it — it is actually going be a panel stage where people can come and hear, I’m calling them, bite-size conversations: 20-minute panels where it’s going to be people from the speaker lineup talking about very specific issues. One of them is going to be Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis interviewing her mom about what she went through in very difficult times. And I hope people can take that as a source of inspiration as we’re in the times that we’re in now.

And then, we’ll have our future mayor [Rep. Anna V. Eskamani] on, so I’m just really stoked about this year’s speaking lineup.

And every year we have a national labor leader. Last year we had Sara Nelson, who’s national president of the Flight Attendants Union. This year, we have April Verrett, who is the National President of SEIU. Not only is she going to be on a panel talking about healthcare workers and the fight for labor fights, but we’ll have a lot of our caretakers and care workers who are part of SEIU with her on stage.

So it’s a stacked lineup of really amazing people, and I think they’ll really speak to the MadSoul audience in the way that they need to hear about these issues,

Proceeds from the event are going to some local organizations — which ones?

Yeah, it’s going to be three organizations. Orlando Center for Justice — and just to give some background on this. Earlier this year, I was kind of wrestling with what organizations we’d want to donate to. But it was literally on the train ride back from Alligator Alcatraz, my first time going, that I said this year MadSoul will support local immigration groups. And it was really being at Alligator Alcatraz and being a part of that struggle that pushed me to make that decision.

I wanted to make sure we had a wide cross section of groups doing different kinds of work, and so we have Orlando Center for Justice, which is a legal aid group which does invaluable work. They don’t have enough money, nearly enough capacity, but my office has worked a lot with them on a lot of different cases.

We have the Hope CommUnity Center, which does a lot of work in helping immigrants kind of get integrated into life here: figure out what to do, know your rights, trainings, registering to vote, citizenship clinic, school, English lessons, Spanish lessons. And then we’re also supporting Florida immigrant Coalition, which is more on the advocacy side. So between these organizations we’re supporting Legal Aid, mutual aid, education and political advocacy, which I think shows a cross-section of the type of work that needs to be done in this moment. We’re really, really stoked about the groups that we’ll be supporting.

When you think about the challenges of last year’s festival — the venue, the weather, the protests — what did you learn and how are you applying it to this year?

What happened last year with weather really put me on edge. As you know, we got very lucky with close calls on weather, but just as easily the whole thing could have been canceled, which we were very close to doing because of inclement weather. I’ve learned December makes it a lot harder for booking artists, but it’s a lot better and easier on the weather front. So I think from here on out, we’ll have MadSoul within that December to February range. Rather it be maybe there’s a cold front, it’s a little too cold outside, versus having lightning and a monsoon.

With the location, Loch Haven Park is beautiful. It was amazing to be out there. But I found, from a security perspective and logistics, it makes a lot more sense for us to move the festival to a music venue and a place that already had a lot of the infrastructure in it, which would allow us to use more resources for keeping people safe, keeping artists safe.

You know, on the protests and what happened, I think there’s a few things. MadSoul ended up falling on a nationwide day of action for Gaza, which I think was a big reason why a protest was planned. And the protests that happened outside, we had many guests that were at the festival that went outside to join the protests and then came inside, and vice versa. I didn’t have an issue with it, you know? There’s a national day of action, this is an important issue to highlight, and Gaza was spoken about on stage a lot.

So I think that what happened outside was fine, but later on in the night, that interruption [Ed. note: Protesters in the crowd interrupted and briefly halted headliner Muna’s set] was actually a different group than who planned the protests outside. And I just think that wasn’t … I don’t think that was right, especially with a group like Muna. They’ve advocated so much and done a lot in terms of speaking out against the genocide in Gaza, and I’m not sure that really helped get a good, positive message across, especially to a lot of the audience. I think a big lesson for me was just making sure we’re intentional about talking about a lot of the issues that people care about.

You have to ask yourself how is your event — if you’re trying to meet the moment culturally with music and different things like that — meeting the moment politically as well? That’s part of the reason I invited a lot of the people I invited this time. We’re going to talk about immigration, we’re going to talk about climate, we’re going to talk about Gaza, we’re going to talk about a lot of the things that are at the top of people’s minds.

It’s important as well to provide — in real life — resources and concrete things you can do. People desperately want to help change how awful seemingly everything is.

Exactly. And a variety of options is so important because I could just, like, we could set it up so it’s literally just my campaign or just the Democratic party. But the fact of the matter is different people are going to want to do different kinds of work, right? It could be electoral politics, it could be mutual aid, it could be advocacy, it could be direct action. At MadSoul we’re going to have, I think, 25 or 30 different organizations who are essentially all vying to get the people going to MadSoul to be involved with their group.

Whether it’s Sunrise Movement or issue advocacy or the Democratic party, you have a lot of options to pick from, which I think is important. Not enough Democrats do that because we tend to want people to just plug into our thing, but it’s really not about that. You’re going to have the opportunity to go and meet people from those groups here locally that can answer a question that a lot of people are asking: “What can I do?” And we want you to get involved with the group that can answer that question for you every single day.

3 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 6, Orlando Amphitheater, 4603 W. Colonial Drive, instagram.com/madsoulfestival, free-$100.

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Orlando Congressman Maxwell Frost speaks on the return of his MadSoul Festival

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