Apart from its sway in presidential elections, I knew very little of Iowa before embarking on Daytrotter’s Barnstormer II tour (aka “Barnstormier”) earlier this month. These dates marked the second incarnation of the live music site’s mini-tour of Wisconsin and Iowa barns, offering compelling new sounds to often passed-over Midwestern communities as well as giving emerging bands the opportunity to play in scenic, unusual spots off the typical rock club circuit.

Daytrotter’s founder, Sean Moeller, put out a call earlier this year for barns in the Quad Cities region that would potentially make for cool venues, and received several responses worth scouting out, eventually choosing the best spaces in Iowa and Wisconsin. “We wanted to try and expand what the website does,” explains Moeller, namely its presentation of bands “all live, no overdubs,” the context in which Moeller and company claim is “the best way to hear someone.” The first Barnstormer took place from July 25th through 29th this year, featuring bands who had previously recorded sessions for the site at Daytrotter’s Rock Island, Illinois-based studio, and it went well enough that preparations began immediately for a fall installment of the tour.

This time, the lineup featured more acts, and three of the barns from the first tour once again played host to shows, along with a couple of new spaces. The individual acts—Dawes, Chris Denny and the Natives, Suckers, Snowblink, Paleo, and, for the first three dates, Maritime and Brooks Strause—had an enormous aesthetic range; these were bands that, under ordinary circumstances, would be unlikely to play with one another at an ordinary club or bar gig. However, in the atypical context of handsome, historic barns, and playing to crowds with a wide age range—families and older folks alongside teenagers and young adults—it somehow clicked in a sensible, very striking way.

Although I was unable to attend the tour’s first two shows in Wisconsin (Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee and Treinen Farm Corn Maze in Lodi), I arrived in Iowa in time for the first of four barn shows in that state. The first barn sat among the rolling hills of Maquoketa, Iowa, a small city near the Maquoketa River. It’s called the Codfish Hollow Barn, a 55-year-old building with a vaulted ceiling, owned by couple Shawn and Tiff Biehl, who spoke with me at length about the barn’s history. Back when Tiff’s grandfather, Arnold Stamp, built and first opened the barn in 1954, it hosted a barn dance—until the first Barnstormer tour, the only event of its kind to take place there. It’s easy to see why the Daytrotter crew wanted to return: Despite the unseasonably cold weather on this particular night, the warmth of the host family and the community in attendance far outweighed the chill. Attendees could take a hay ride down the hill from the road to the barn, in which the Biehls had recently constructed an actual stage using lumber lying around the farm. As it got darker, the whole building was aglow with decorative holiday lights and the glowsticks that local kids were hawking at a dollar a pop to benefit the barn. When they weren’t watching the performances, everyone was bundled up and gathered around the fire pits outside—the night before was, according to the National Weather Service, autumn’s coldest frost.

Aside from the tour’s five mainstay acts (who we’ll get into shortly), there were two artists whose last night on the Barnstormer was this Maquoketa show: Milwaukee-based pop band Maritime whose roots extend back to legendary ’90s emo-pop band the Promise Ring, and Brooks Strause, an Iowa-based songwriter who, while rarely on tour, ought to be listened to well beyond his home state.

Maritime had a history with Daytrotter going into this tour, having recorded two sessions for the site in the last couple of years. Sitting down with the now six-year-old group, they explained that, although they had, indeed, played in barns before, they had never played consecutive nights in them. “This is the kind of thing that actually makes ‘punk rock’ punk rock,” said guitarist/lead singer Davey von Bohlen, who also expressed amazement at the fact that, after having toured the country so many times, they were experiencing moments of saying to themselves, “I’ve never been down this road!” Maritime, which also features guitarist/keyboardist Dan Hinz, drummer Dan Didier, and bassist Justin Klug, are about 12 songs into completing a new record, which they’re going to “whittle down” to size soon. “It’s really cool that they put such an eclectic mix of bands together—this is one of the only situations where this can work,” said Klug. That night, the band was the second-to-last group on the bill, performing a thoroughly fun set that included the keyboard-laden “Tearing Up the Oxygen” as well as “Guns of Navarone”, for which barn co-owner Tiff joined the group on vocals.