Students voiced mixed feelings about the nighttime headliner for Mayfest Productions’ 53rd annual Dillo Day music festival, British singer-songwriter Natasha Bedingfield, who was announced Thursday.

Best known for her 2000s songs “Unwritten” and “Pocketful of Sunshine,” Bedingfield follows previous Dillo Day headliners such as Swae Lee, Offset, Dominic Fike and Playboi Carti.

Immediately after Mayfest announced Bedingfield as the headliner on Instagram, students flooded the announcement post with frustrated comments. Some students also expressed their disappointment on Fizz, an anonymous campus-specific social media platform.

One NU student posted a screenshot on Fizz comparing Bedingfield’s Instagram following of 426,000 users to 2024 headliner Lee’s 11.7 million, captioned, “I think this tells us everything we need to know.” The post received around two thousand upvotes.

Bedingfield is slated to become the first ever female headliner to perform at Dillo Day, Weinberg senior and Mayfest Head of Bookings Nathan Dent said. 

McCormick junior Ryan Murphy said he noticed a discrepancy between past headliners and Bedingfield, namely in age and genre.

He said many previous artists they booked had newer music that students listened to in high school.  

“‘Unwritten’ came out in 2004, and it’s basically as old as me,” Murphy said. “Although I enjoy the song, I don’t strongly resonate with the excitement or the announcement.”

Murphy also said many students look forward to nighttime headliners being hip hop or trap artists that they can “mosh to.”

SESP sophomore Nur Yalinbas said she found out the headliner news while in class. Shortly after, she left a disappointed comment under the announcement post on Instagram. 

“I don’t see, like, a mosh going on to ‘Unwritten’ or anything,” Yalinbas said. “I can’t really see it getting lit at all, especially for the night.”

McCormick senior Liv Brown, who also commented under the post, said she would rather have daytime headliner BigXthaPlug as the nighttime headliner instead. 

She said Bedingfield’s music is much more mellow in comparison and thought Mayfest would announce more artists after her.

“For a nighttime concert, you want someone who’s going to be like, good energy,” Brown said. “‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ is an upbeat song, sure, but I wouldn’t consider it hype.”

Other students, like McCormick sophomore Annelise Klenz, said they are excited to watch Bedingfield perform despite not knowing much of her discography.

Klenz said many people did not know the lyrics to Lee’s songs last year either. 

“I am more of a pop music girl, so this speaks to me more,” Klenz said. “I can understand why some people who might not have that same music taste wouldn’t be as excited, but I felt like it was a good difference from last year.” 

Dent said Mayfest prioritized finding a female artist for this year’s Dillo Day. He also said Mayfest heard students were tired of rap headliners after Lee in 2024 and Offset in 2023, so this year’s search focused on pop artists. 

He said Bedingfield performed well on the artist poll Mayfest released in winter, when students could vote for their preferred artists to perform Dillo Day.  

“She was one of the highest polling options we had, and she was the highest polling realistic option that was on there,” Dent said. “We felt like we were getting somebody who there was a lot of enthusiasm for on campus.”

Students expressed excitement about the rest of the festival’s lineup. Those who did not care for Bedingfield as headliner said they felt optimistic about Ravyn Lenae and BigXthaPlug’s performances — both up-and-coming artists who recently performed at Coachella. 

Like in previous years, genres like hip hop, R&B, indie and EDM are still represented in this year’s Dillo Day lineup. But this time, nostalgic pop took the highly-regarded closing spot.

“With the way that the rest of the lineup is composed largely of people who were up and coming, Natasha felt like a nice touch in that she is a nostalgic pick,” Dent said. “She is somebody who has had a real cultural footprint, whose music is a real touchstone.”

McCormick sophomore Vera Monteiro said Mayfest usually finds artists that target NU’s student demographic well, especially when they advertise Dillo Day as the largest student-run music festival in the country.

But when she looked at other colleges’ festival headliners, such as rapper Gunna at Cornell’s Slope Day, she said she thought Bedingfield was a last-minute headliner choice, perhaps even a replacement.  

“The people on Mayfest are so musically intelligent,” Monteiro said. “They all know so much about music, and they know what would be a good headliner. I just can’t imagine that all these people actually came together and were like, ‘Yeah, Northwestern is gonna love Natasha Bedingfield as our headliner.’”

A previous version of this story misstated that Charli XCX was going to headline Dillo Day in 2015. She was scheduled as a mainstage performer. The Daily regrets this error. 

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