You can’t rightly turn into a total wet blanket when it rains at a concert that’s all about celebrating the joys and vagaries of the great outdoors.

I mean, you can – but that would just make you a buzzkill. (Don’t be a buzzkill.)

You just gotta keep livin’ man. L-I-V-I-N.

Granted, the skies literally opened up over Civic Center Park on Sunday, forcing a full (ish) evacuation to allow a brief but Biblical gullywasher to pass. Thousands of soggy people had to cue back up and patiently wait to re-enter through security before the show could continue. 

That all amounted to about an hour-long interruption halfway through the second day of the second Outside Festival that ought forever be known as the Festival of Chill.

Another crowd at another festival might have led to some serious tension. But the Outside Fest tends to attract easygoing bands and laid-back crowds. The vibe is groovy. No elbows, no moshing, no bruising. This is the only music festival on the planet where security says please and thank you.

The Outside Festival essentially amounts to a massive business summit promoting the outdoor industry. Sunday’s concert portion amounted to a cloudburst on a camping trip.

So it rained buckets, whatevs. Despite some slightly shortened sets, all of the scheduled bands went on. Alabama’s Waxahatchee reconvened the music with the Shakespeare-inspired “Much Ado About Nothing,” and when Katie Crutchfield sang, “I watch the sky fill up with shapes I cannot explain,” I wanted to yell: “Yeah, those were raindrops the size of trucks!”

And yet, five hours after the flood, this quintessential Colorado night ended as they almost always do this time of year – with the late-night sky settled in a state of glorious, warm calm. 

An estimated 30,000 came out (over both days) to swoon and sway and clap along and maybe get a little muddy. I said it last year, and I now say it again: The Outside Festival is just one giant musical bear hug.

Consider the stated musical philosophy of Colorado’s own The Copper Children: “We are here for everyone looking to heal and feel, creating experiences centered on love, integrity, harmony and authenticity.” And that could pretty much describe all the day’s bands.

That started Sunday with emerging Denver folk melodist Cole Scheifele and the aforementioned The Copper Children, whose musical motto might best be summarized by their own lyrics: “Sometimes life’s unsteady, but I am ready for the ride.” (Side note: I have no idea what the meowing song was about, but that must have been extra awesome when they played at Meow Wolf two years back.)

The crowd was next introduced to Hazlett, a band fronted by an Aussie from Chicago who’d fit right in at a Lumineers backyard bar-be-cue. Saturday was the band’s first-ever appearance at a music festival.

The afternoon featured a feisty fusion of gospel, psych, and country rock with strings, strings and more strings of all kinds carrying the day – and sometimes to fiery effect, as best demonstrated by Waxahatchee. That outfit is fronted by the singular firecracker Katie Crutchfield, an Alabama Slammer who comes at you with the force of a personal reckoning.

It’s impossible to take your eyes off Crutchfield, what with the way she commands the stage. But if you did so long enough on Sunday, you might have noticed that was Wilco legend Jeff Tweedy’s son, Spencer, powering the percussion on irresistible tracks like “Problem With It.”

Minnesota’s Trampled by Turtles is a hard-bowing turbo-powered bluegrass band with a couple of old-school bad*ss pickers who have fiddled their way straight out of ZZ Top’s heyday. They riled up the crowd with “Darkness and Light,” a breakup song that opens with the winking apology “Colorado was so nice, but I’m Minnesota’s son,” followed by a cover of the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind.” The Turtles played their whole set with the lyrics to their 2012 song “Midnight on the Interstate” displayed on the big screen behind them like an open-hearted mantra: “Love and love and nothing else … (is all I need).”

Ironically, headliner Lord Huron, the band everyone waited out the rain to see, later countered with a song called “Nothing I Need.”

Lord Huron was back in Denver two nights after headlining at Red Rocks. Festival sets are always shorter than standalone concerts, but beloved frontman Ben Schneider, dressed in his Colorado coolest Western attire, offered up with his mates a significant, 18-song set that butted right up with the city’s Sunday night curfew.

Local fans who attended both shows got some duplication, but the festival set included five titles not played in Morrison: “Ancient Names, Part I,” “Nothing I Need,” “I Lied,” “Let the Devil Come” and “Wait by the River.”

Lord Huron has a new record coming out July 18 titled “The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1,” but the band only played two tracks from that. All that matters is that they played the two songs these peaceniks would have rioted for had they not: The penultimate, pre-encore lament “The Night We Met,” a musical moment now canonized in pop-culture by the controversial teen suicide drama “13 Reasons Why,” and the upbeat ender, “Not Dead Yet.”

I’m not kidding about “The Night We Met”: That one gorgeous song of regret, terror and mortality now has more than 3 billion (with a b) plays on Spotify. And on Sunday, it played with a heart bigger than all outdoors. Everyone left the Outside Festival dryish and happy.

All right, all right, all right …

More photos at the top of this page