While some people are focused on curating a list of hypothetical music to bring to a deserted island someday, Hayden Arnot has been busy bringing live music back to the popular island of Nantucket right now.

In the ’90s, the harbor city—tucked off the southeast side of Massachusetts—was home to a popular concert venue called the Muse that brought in national touring acts like John Mayer, Hootie & the Blowfish, Guster, Train, Dave Matthews Band, and Dispatch. “But then the stage went dark,” says Arnot, citing rising costs of transportation and lodging in the resort town as culprits.

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Nantucket is not just a traditional city you can drive up to on a tour bus; bands and crews can only access it by ferries, and you can imagine how much that cost adds up when semis carrying stage setups have to be transported while a 16-person crew needs hotel rooms for a night or two. Still, the lack of a national touring circuit didn’t sit well with Arnot—and he wanted to find a way to change it.

The New York native has been visiting Nantucket since he was a kid and has always wanted to share his passion for the island with the rest of the world. He first did so a few years ago by launching his potato chip company, Nantucket Crisps, that packs in the flavors and culture of the destination.

“But at the same time, my greatest passion in life has been music. I love bringing amazing musicians to great places,” Arnot shares. Since 2021, he has also been booking bands at venues in Vermont and Park City, Utah, and in 2025, he decided to pitch Muse owner Mike O’Reilly on the concept for a summer series. O’Reilly agreed and in just a couple months, Arnot had confirmed Mt. Joy, All Time Low, Boys Like Girls, and St. Paul and the Broken Bones for concert dates that received a ton of interest from locals.

“We brought the space back to life,” Arnot proudly shares. “At each show, there’d be the hedge fund guy next to the girl working at the yacht club for the summer next to the person who was at Dave Matthews 35 years ago and people like my dad, who’s 79—all these different backgrounds coming together for music in a space that used to breathe it. It was really special.”

At one of those shows, Arnot met fellow music fan and musician and record producer Jason Mendelson, who had been visiting from Colorado. As they got to talking, something clicked and the idea for the Nantucket Music Foundation was hatched to help make the concert series bigger and more sustainable, and provide a philanthropic mission at the same time. And if this summer’s robust inaugural lineup is any indication, they are really on to something. Kicking off June 7 and rolling through Labor Day weekend, the Muse’s quaint stage will feature the Marcus King Band, Everclear, Jimmy Eat World, Sugar Ray, the Head and the Heart, Yellowcard, Dashboard Confessional, the Fray, Better Than Ezra, Third Eye Blind’s Stephen Jenkins, and more than a dozen additional acts.

The concept, says Arnot, is “taking the biggest bands that are playing places like MGM Music Hall, Red Rocks, TD Garden, and then taking them 30 miles out to sea to a small dive bar, stripping them back, and making them play in this small room that they haven’t done since they weren’t famous, since when they were packing up in a minivan. But at the same time, we’re bringing together our community and raising funds for important causes.”

“To put it in context, the Muse at most can sell 350 tickets. So financially it would be impossible to make your money back unless you only sold to the uber wealthy, which we didn’t want to do,” explains Mendelson, who, along with his wife Jenn, serve as co-founders behind Nantucket Music Foundation while Arnot is executive director. “But with a foundation, we figured we could get people in the room to see the bands they want and partner with a community-based organization that is doing important work for the island.”

This year’s partner is Fairwinds, a behavioral health center in Nantucket that offers mental health services and help for addiction recovery. Nantucket Music Foundation also plans to donate tickets to essential workers and first responders.

“Fairwinds is so important because Nantucket is a lovely place in the summertime. But in the winter months, it gets gray and dark and bleak. And there is a suicide problem and a lot of substance abuse, and they never turn anyone away,” Arnot notes, adding, “Unfortunately it has been a taboo issue on the island, though people are becoming more open with the Noah Kahans of the world on stage talking about their therapists and Lexapro. So, when we reached out to Fairwinds to be our fiscal sponsor and partner, they were really interested. They wanted to get their name out there and be associated with these artists and all these fresh new eyes, seeing what they do.”

Below, Arnot and Mendelson explain more about the long-term plans for Nantucket Music Foundation, why bands are so eager to play the series, and how Nantucket author Elin Hilderbrand plays into it.

For those who don’t know much about Nantucket, can you explain a bit about its makeup and why it’s been such a challenge to get touring artists to the island?

Hayden Arnot: If we go way back, the area used to be inhabited by the Wampanoag tribe. And then in the late 1600s, 1700s, the Quakers arrived and it became the whaling capital of the world. It’s the reason why the island looks the way it does with the cobblestone streets, the beautiful homes, and the architecture. Every time you buy a home on Nantucket, 1% of that transaction goes to buying more land for the conservation foundation. So, they do a really good job of keeping this place special. And in modern times, it’s become an artist commune and a vacation destination. But, until recently, it was always a hard place to get to with no direct flights and the ferry was two and a half hours. So, it was really just people coming from Boston every weekend. For locals, it would also be hard for you to go see your favorite band in nearby cities, especially in the summer, because it’s your bread and butter season. And even if you do, it’s a $100 round-trip ferry, $300 hotel room, the cost of the concert ticket, etc. Yet one of the most heard phrases on Nantucket is, “Who is playing at X stage?” There are a ton of little venues on the island and people are obsessed with music. So, what we really wanted to do was take it up a level and take those great artists that normally wouldn’t play out to the island and make the local community really happy.

Jason Mendelson: In Nantucket, there’s a big gap between the local musician circuit, where there’s a lot of good folks, but then somebody that you would go pay $100 or $200 for a ticket. That’s a very different market.

How does having a formal foundation change that?

HA: At the end of last summer, we walked away with two things. We realized that, one, the local community loved the series and it meant a lot to people. But at the same time, we didn’t know how to continue it because financially it made absolutely zero sense. Every show was running at a loss because the math doesn’t work. You can’t take a band that’s playing for 5,000 people then play for 375 and break even. And we’re lucky a lot of these artists are giving us mega breaks, because they get it. But doing music like this on Nantucket is quite expensive. So Jason and Jenn and I were all having dinner one night and I told them I want to keep doing this. And it was Jason who said, “You should start a foundation and take a look at all these other resort destination towns and think about what that could be like.” I hadn’t thought of it that way.

JM: Having a foundation, we are able to offer subsidized tickets. But when you set up a 501(c)(3), it takes forever for the IRS to put the rubber stamp on it. So having Fairwinds as our fiscal sponsor made them a perfect partner for us in year one.

Do you plan to have new charitable partners every year?

JM: There are so many good charities here that we want to explore. One thing we’ve talked about is affordable housing and also looking at kids and music. One of the things Hayden and I talk about all the time is how we’re both super passionate about showing kids careers in music. Or at least the power of music. We really want to show kids that this is cool.

This series is a pretty radical concept for the bands of a certain stature that are committing to these smaller gigs, as you mentioned. What is your pitch to them?

HA: Booking music for five years, I’ve become very close with artists and managers and agents, and I really come off to them as a friend. And every time an artist comes out, we show them such a good time that when they leave, there’s rave reviews and that word goes around. After Martin Johnson from Boys Like Girls came out last summer, he loved it so much that he’s actively looking to buy a home on Nantucket right now.

JM: And think about how many artists are bringing their families with them, too. They don’t get to see their families on tour usually, and they’re seeing this as an opportunity to not only connect with the island but to connect with their own families in a way that they wouldn’t do because it’s so unique.

HA: But it’s also that sometimes these bands have been around for a while, and the only time they really hang out is in the studio or touring. With what we offer, this is the time where they’re together for like three days, and sometimes they have a couple of days between the show where they can hang together like they used to. It’s really cool to show them our special place like that. The other fun thing is that the relationship continues to develop. The All Time Low guys had such a good time on the island, they were like, how do we continue doing stuff together? So, Nantucket Crisps is releasing an All Low Time-flavored potato chip that will come out soon.

How did you get started with a chip company after being so ingrained in the music world?

HA: There was a local “Shark Tank” event years ago that I applied for, and I got in. Actually Elin Hilderbrand [the author of Nantucket-based books like The Perfect Couple and Five-Star Weekend, both of which have been adapted into TV shows] was one of the judges. I won, and once I did, the whole island was like, how could you not start the chip company? So, Elin is really the reason why Nantucket Crisps exists.

Who are some of the people coming to the Muse shows? Is it mostly locals?

HA: Some are residents but we kind of pull from everywhere. There’s a lot of people who are residents of Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut. But there are people traveling for these shows from England, California, Canada.

The way the dates work out, it almost seems like similar bands were booked next to one another. Was that intentional so that you could turn it into a multi-night experience?

HA: In a way, yes. If someone’s going to come out for Jimmy Eat World, you might as well double down for New Found Glory the next night. Another example: the Maine is coming out and all these fans are saying, we’re pumped but the hotel is making us stay two nights. I’m secretly like, that’s all right. You know, book the night before, because someone’s going to announce soon that you might like. It makes the trip even more worth it.

In the future, will it be just the summer season you focus on, or do you have plans to turn this into a year-round venture?

HA: It is heavy on the summer for now, but a big component of our mission is to have music year-round, like in October, November, February, March. Because that’s when it’s really needed most. That’s when nothing is going on and it’s when mental health becomes more of an issue. When I’ve been on the island in March, I’ve been lonely. I stayed to myself because I didn’t have a reason to go out, so we want to provide a reason to get outside of your house and reconnect with the community and sing together. That goes a long way and can really help people feel less alone.

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