cody

After a brief reprieve following the end of Coachella, we find ourselves in the desert again for Stagecoach — hot, dusty and eager to be amused. The first day of the weekend offered plenty of top-tier country performances including Cody Johnson, Ella Langley, and Bailey Zimmerman along with a dose of nostalgia courtesy of ‘90s stars Counting Crows and Emo Nite featuring Ashlee Simpson. Let’s also not forget that Stagecoach is a place to catch celebrity cameos—we’re looking at you, Sydney Sweeney. Here’s our recap of all the fun we experienced on Day 1 of the festival.

Jessie Erickson, of Anchorage, Alaska, sings “more than my home town” by Morgan Wallen at the SYRN Saloon during the Stagecoach Country Music Festival at Empire Polo Club, in Indio, CA on April 24, 2026.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

I found a karaoke bar at Stagecoach — but it was Sydney Sweeney’s lingerie pop-up

En route to the press tent this sunny Friday, I saw a spot with saloon doors boasting karaoke. It didn’t click that the air-conditioned pop-up was a bar connected to Sydney Sweeney’s Syrn brand until I was inside and saw the lingerie hanging from the bar.

It was early in the day, so not much karaoke was happening, but you could scan a QR code and sign up via a Karafun link. I contemplated doing “A Long December” from the Counting Crows since they’re playing the Mustang Stage this evening, but thought it would No.1 bring down the mood and No.2, not really fit in with the Coyote Ugly vibes.

However, I saw dartboards on the wall and a sign to ask the “brand ambassador” about darts and I immediately thought — the hard drinkin’ Stagecoach crowd should probably not have sharp objects. They don’t. I found a “brand ambassador” and he showed off the darts, which were magnetic. It still might not be the best idea to let people throw projectiles as the night goes on, though. (Vanessa Franko)

Emo nite featuring Ashlee Simpson performs at Diplo’s Honkytonk during the Stagecoach Country Music Festival at Empire Polo Club, in Indio, CA on April 24, 2026.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Emo Nite with Ashlee Simpson and 3OH!3 made Stagecoach dance with their feelings

I said that it felt like I went to Warped Tour two weeks ago when I saw ska/punk band Less Than Jake perform at Coachella’s Heineken House and this weekend I found the Stagecoach version of Warped Tour on Day 1!

How is the giant country festival channeling the SoCal-born traveling punk festival, you ask? The popular Emo Nite DJ set was booked at Diplo’s Honky Tonk. (Emo Nite is no stranger to the Goldenvoice desert fests, by the way. They played the Sahara Tent at Coachella a few years back, too.)

Emo Nite’s Morgan Reed and T.J. Petracca opened up with Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar We’re Goin Down” to set the sing-a-long tone before blistering through a set of remixes to songs by beloved emo and pop-punk artists such as Panic! At the Disco, Paramore, All-American Rejects and My Chemical Romance. They also played some emo-adjacent and not-so-emo-adjacent tracks, such as the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” System of a Down’s “Chop Suey” and Justin Bieber’s “Baby.” (Bieberchella lives even at Stagecoach!)

Actress Sydney Sweeney takes photos with fans during the Stagecoach.

(Evan Schaben/For The Times)

Sydney Sweeney takes pictures with fans at Stagecoach

Actress Sydney Sweeney snapped photos with fans during BigXThaPlug’s set at the Mustang Stage Friday at Stagecoach. Sweeney also has a pop-up bar promoting her lingerie line Syrn at the festival. (Evan Schaben)

Ella Langley performs on the Mane Stage during the Stagecoach Country Music Festival at Empire Polo Club, in Indio, CA on April 24, 2026.

(Evan Schaben/For The Times)

Ella Langley takes a victory lap

“I’m gonna go ahead and burst your bubble,” Ella Langley said about halfway through her main-stage set Friday night. She’d just teed up her brand-new single, “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” a shimmering roots-soul duet with country’s biggest star, Morgan Wallen. “Morgan is not here,” she continued. “He’s on dad duty this weekend. Can’t blame a man for being a good dad.”

And you can’t blame Langley for managing expectations. But she didn’t need Wallen (or anybody else) to show why she’s the biggest thing in country music right now: This was an effortlessly cool performance by a deeply vibey singer and songwriter who’s absorbed more than Stevie Nicks’ predilection for lightweight shawls. (“Broken” was extremely Fleetwood Mac-coded.)

Langley did bring out a special guest: the podcaster Theo Von, who did Riley Green’s part in “You Look Like You Love Me” for some reason. (Big podcaster energy is what I’ll say.) She played “Choosin’ Texas” — her dreamy pop-country smash that’s currently at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 — not last but next to last, leaving “Weren’t for the Wind” as her closer. Baller move. (Mikael Wood)

Counting Crows will perform on Sept. 3 at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.

(Courtesy of the San Diego Symphony)

Counting Crows and the perfect Stagecoach sunset

I am very into the ‘90s alt acts playing Stagecoach 2026 (I see you, Third Eye Blind) and Counting Crows got things off to a sublime start as the sun set Friday.

While the band played its breakout hit, “Mr. Jones,” early in the set, singer Adam Duritz let the crowd take the lead and almost did some spoken word in the second verse.

“How was your first day at country Coachella? They only call it Stagecoach because Count-chella doesn’t sound good,” the singer asked the crowd before the band launched into the “Shrek 2” ditty “Accidentally in Love.”

The hits kept coming, including “Round Here” and “Rain King.”

But the perfect moment under cotton candy skies happened during the band’s penultimate song, “A Long December” off 1996’s “Recovering the Satellites.” With the crowd singing along, the sun setting behind the mountains and good feelings all around, it was nothing if not a vibe. (VF)

Bailey Zimmerman performs on the Mane Stage during the Stagecoach Country Music Festival at Empire Polo Club, in Indio, CA on April 24, 2026.

(Evan Schaben/For The Times)

Bailey Zimmerman with an encouraging word

Bailey Zimmerman brought his puppy-ish energy — and an encouraging self-help message — to Stagecoach’s main stage Friday night ahead of Cody Johnson’s headlining set. “I grew up with nothing, and I worked my ass off to be where I am,” he bellowed before ripping off his shirt to punctuate the point. (MW)

Cody Johnson performs on the Mane Stage during the Stagecoach Country Music Festival at Empire Polo Club, in Indio, CA on April 24, 2026.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Cody Johnson closes Night 1 with Boyz II Men

Cody Johnson opened his headlining set Friday night by promising to “bring a little Texas to California if that’s all right with y’all.” Yet the most surprising moment of his 90-minute show actually brought a bit of Philadelphia to Stagecoach when Boyz II Men dropped in to join Johnson for a rendition of the veteran R&B crew’s “On Bended Knee.”

If we’re being honest, the vocal mix was … not the evening’s finest. But the selection was appealingly unexpected from a down-the-middle country star like Johnson, who spent much of the rest of his set recounting his long music-industry come-up and urging folks to see past their differences in the name of unity.

He also lamented the three months he had to take off the road after busting his eardrum last year — “I was depressed about it,” he said — before acknowledging that the unanticipated break meant he got to be home for the birth of his youngest child. (MW)

Choosin’ to stay home instead of trekking out to Indio for this weekend’s Stagecoach festival? Don’t worry, you’ll be able to listen to all the country music your heart desires. You can get your country heartbreak on with Ella Langley, Bailey Zimmerman and Cody Johnson, and then rock out with Counting Crows. If you prefer EDM, you can catch Diplo and Dillstradamus (Dillon Francis and Flosstradamus) as Friday’s closing acts.

The festival will be livestreamed on Amazon Music, Amazon Prime Video and Twitch beginning at 3 p.m. On Sirius XM’s The Highway (channel 56), you can listen to exclusive interviews and live performances along with a special edition of the Music Row Happy Hour. The station Y’Allternative will also be covering the festival on Friday evening.

Here are updated set times for the Stagecoach livestream Friday performances (times presented are PDT):

Channel 1

3:05 p.m. Noah Rinker; 3:25 p.m.; Adrien Nunez; 4 p.m. Ole 60; 4:25 p.m. Avery Anna; 5 p.m. Chase Rice; 5:55 p.m. Nate Smith; 6:50 p.m. Ella Langeley; 7:50 p.m. Bailey Zimmerman; 8:55 p.m. the Red Clay Strays; 10 p.m. Cody Johnson; 11:30 p.m. Diplo

Channel 2

3:05 p.m. Neon Union; 3:25 p.m. Larkin Poe; 4 p.m. Marcus King Band; 4:50 p.m. Lyle Lovett; 5:35 p.m. BigXthaPlug; 6:30 p.m. Noah Cyrus; 7 p.m. Wynonna Judd; 8 p.m. Counting Crows; 8:50 p.m. Sam Barber; 10 p.m. Dan + Shay; 10:45 p.m. Diplo featuring Juicy J; 11:05 p.m. Rebecca Black; 11:45 p.m. Dillstradamus

Sirius XM Music Row Happy Hour

1 p.m. Avery Anna; 2 p.m. Nate Smith; 2:30 p.m. Josh Ross; 3 p.m. Cody Johnson; 3:30 p.m. Gabriella Rose; 5:15 p.m. Nate Smith; 7:50 p.m. Bailey Zimmerman; 9:30 p.m. Cody Johnson; 11 p.m. Diplo

Sirius XM Y’Allternative

5 p.m. Ole 60; 6 p.m. Larkin Poe; 7 p.m. Marcus King Band; 8 p.m. Sam Barber

Victoria Pedretti was fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama when she was cast in Mike Flanagan’s acclaimed 2018 horror series, “The Haunting of Hill House.”

In her breakout role as Nell Crain, the youngest and most sensitive of five adult siblings reckoning with wounds from a childhood summer spent in a cursed home, Pedretti became the undisputed heart of “Hill House,” anchoring the show with a spellbinding performance that christened her as a scream queen. Her subsequent appearances in “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “You” were characterized by a similar dramatic intensity, solidifying her renown in the horror genre.

But in Pedretti’s new “Forbidden Fruits,” a horror-comedy directed by Meredith Alloway making her feature debut and produced by “Jennifer’s Body” screenwriter Diablo Cody, the actor shines in all-new soapy splendor.

Set in a Dallas shopping mall, “Forbidden Fruits” revolves around an elite clique of retail employees who run a witches’ coven out of the basement of their boho boutique Free Eden. Pedretti stars alongside Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung and Alexandra Shipp.

Victoria Pedretti in the movie “Forbidden Fruits.”

(Sabrina Lantos / Independent Film Company and Shudder)

Initially asked to look at both the roles of whimsigoth physics buff Fig and the bubbly yet emotionally complex Cherry, described by Alloway as a “Texas Brigitte Bardot,” Pedretti fell hard for the latter.

“She really popped off the page,” Pedretti, 31, says on a recent Zoom interview she takes while on a sandwich run in L.A. “I entered into this glorious flow state.”

“I can’t say I’ve had any experience quite like it, where I really didn’t spend a lot of time questioning myself,” the actor says. “She kind of took over.”

That confidence was perhaps the product of Pedretti performing in two stage plays before “Forbidden Fruits” — or maybe it was the nighttime filming schedule. Either way, Pedretti says she improvised constantly and always kept swinging until somebody said, “Cut.”

The result: Pedretti in Alloway’s instant cult classic is a laugh-out-loud-funny unending well of charm, packing humor into even her most routine dialogue. In her best quotable moments, she seamlessly infuses her sometimes shrill timbre with a dash of Southern drawl. One of her most iconic facial expressions in the film is already circulating as a reaction meme online.

“I was enjoying being in this character so much, I just wouldn’t stop,” Pedretti says, adding that Alloway, who was sensitive to cast members’ interpretations of their roles, supported experimentation.

Alloway praises the Philadelphia-born Pedretti for nailing Cherry’s comedic moments yet also grounding the character in a traumatic backstory — a balancing act the director knew she was capable of after watching “Hill House.”

“I saw her in that show and I was like, ‘Who is that?’” Alloway says. “She is magnificent and so raw. I didn’t feel like I was watching someone acting. I was worried for her.”

After later watching Pedretti nail her role in “You” as Love Quinn, a wealthy, charismatic chef who hides a psychopathic nature, Alloway was convinced of her star power.

Victoria Pedretti in the movie “You.”

(John P. Fleenor / Netflix)

Cody was most familiar with Pedretti’s performance in “You,” pegging the actor as an “intense brunet” that didn’t square at first with her interpretation of Cherry as an Anna Nicole Smith type.

“Then I see the movie and I’m like, oh my God, she has that fragility,” Cody recalls. “She has that humor. She has that sexuality. She has all of it.

“Victoria brought all of those layers and I’m really blown away by her,” the Oscar-winning “Juno” screenwriter adds.

Cody says she wasn’t surprised that the film drew such talent. From the moment Alloway and Lily Houghton, who wrote the play “Forbidden Fruits” is based on and cowrote the film’s screenplay, brought the material to Cody and her producing partner Mason Novick, she became obsessed.

“It feels spiritually like a film that I would want to be part of my body of work,” Cody says. She remembers being especially delighted by the echoes of “Jennifer’s Body” present in Alloway and Houghton’s screenplay.

“Jennifer’s Body” was widely considered a box-office flop and critical failure upon its release in 2009 — grossing only $31 million worldwide against a $16-million budget — but in recent years has enjoyed a reappraisal as a stealth-feminist essential, reclaimed by superfans.

“I don’t think that the world was ready for these kinds of themes,” Cody says of the movie’s ideas, including the cost of toxic femininity, the nuances of female friendship and the pervasiveness of the male gaze.

When it came to promoting “Jennifer’s Body,” the producer adds, “there was a huge emphasis on trying to market it to straight men, based on Megan [Fox] being attractive, and that was not at all the point of the film, so that was frustrating.” Conversely, “Forbidden Fruits” speaks intimately to the female experience and “doesn’t attempt to pander to any other demographic.”

“The current zeitgeist is a great place for a movie like this,” she says. “This movie is for the girls, gays and theys, as they say.”

Alloway, a trained actor who worked as a film journalist before moving into directing, was struck with a similar feeling when she first discovered Houghton’s play, right around the time she was consuming copious media about women criminals, such as Tori Telfer’s 2017 book “Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History.”

“I was so entrenched in why women commit acts of crime,” Alloway said, adding that she was disappointed to find that revenge films on the subject still often revolved around men.

Picking up Houghton’s script, the director recalls feeling relieved. “Oh, this is just about women,” she says, her face brightening. “This is about women friendships, women being pitted against each other.”

In an early meeting with Houghton, Alloway told the playwright she’d like to bring a genre lens to “turn up the dial on the emotions that you feel reading the play and make them accessible to people who haven’t had these experiences — or validate people who have.”

Outside of the opportunity to work with so many other young women, Pedretti said she was drawn to “Forbidden Fruits” because of its use of style and tone.

“It asks a lot of people to try to step into a world like this one,” the actor says of the unabashedly histrionic screenplay. “And as nerve-racking as it may be to take that big swing, you gotta take the big swing.”

“She has that fragility,” says producer Diablo Cody of Pedretti. “She has that humor. She has that sexuality. She has all of it.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

And swing she does: Pedretti plays up Cherry’s emotional volatility, giving her a full-bodied form of expression. The actor even did her own onscreen makeup (as did Reinhart) and collaborated heavily with costume designer Sarah Millman on Cherry’s wardrobe and styling. Plus, she performed her first topless scene — in a sequence that doesn’t involve men or even sex.

“I’m really proud of the way we use nudity to show a certain kind of unspoken comfortability among women,” she continues. “I remember always getting such a thrill at the comfort level of a girl being like, ‘We’re going to the bathroom together,’ and to me, that is that moment.”

It’s a perfect example of a scene that doesn’t try to speak to anyone except those it’s specifically written for, and one that you only get with women at the helm of a production.

Reflecting on the agency she had to shape Cherry, Pedretti says she is more inspired to explore directorial projects of her own.

“I am so interested in protecting these spaces to be positive, creative experiences for everyone involved,” she says.

Whenever Pedretti does make her feature debut behind the camera (she’s already made a short or two), perhaps Cody will pick up the phone.