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Lexington Music Awards organizers David McLean and Heather Parrish in front of the Lyric Theatre. The inaugural awards ceremony will take place Feb. 22.
On February 22, while Emmy-nominated celebrities line up on the red carpet in Los Angeles, Lexington will host its own awards ceremony honoring a unique pool of local talent that exists in and around our city.
Taking place at the Lyric Theatre, the inaugural Lexington Music Awards (or LEXI Awards, as organizers have dubbed it) will honor Lexington area musicians and music industry folks in 30 different categories, ranging from best venue to song of the year. The event is the brainchild of Lexington music teacher and musician David McLean, who said he tossed the idea for the event around for several years before deciding late last year that the timing was right to go for it.
“I think 2010 was the first time I had a conversation about it,” McLean said. He admits that many of the conversations he’s had about the event – particularly those in the early stages – have been met with resistance, with hesitations ranging from concerns about creating rifts between musicians to fears the event would grow bigger than organizers could feasibly manage.
McLean is adamant about the event being designed to celebrate and give cohesion to Lexington’s music scene, rather than cause a divide.
“I've tried my best to gear this towards a celebration of the music community, not as contest,” he said. Of course, he admits that as with all first year events of this scale, there are bound to be some missteps along the way that he can only hope to repair in the future, should the event move forward.
“If it fails, it’s probably because I dropped the ball somewhere,” he said. “All I can do is try not to mess it up enough to make it fail.”
As for the event snowballing to the point it is difficult to keep up with – that’s a fear to which McLean can relate rather well. After deciding he was going to pursue the event this past fall, he reached out to the owners of Natasha’s Bistro to see if the modest downtown venue might be interested in hosting the event, figuring they would probably “struggle to put 75 bodies in seats,” he said. Natasha’s venue organizers were on board and supportive of the event, and McLean created a Facebook group to start to organize initial details.
Within a few days, the group had grown from a handful of friends and fellow musicians who McLean had invited, to several hundred members who had joined on their own accord.
“Suddenly we were scrambling,” he said. With the population of interested parties continuing to balloon, McLean realized he needed to find a larger venue, ultimately coming to agreeable terms with Lyric Theatre director Rasheedah El-Amin for the 526-seat theater to host the event. The event will be emceed by WLEX television personalities Bill Meck and Kristen Pflum and will feature performances by Ben Lacy, Miles Osland and more, with guest presenters ranging from “America’s Next Top Model” contestant Laura Kirkpatrick to local celebrity chef Dan Wu slated to present the awards for the various categories.
Organizing the event has been a labor of love for McLean and Heather Parrish, a fellow Lexington musician who volunteered to help coordinate the event after reading about it on Facebook. Together, the two organizers have rallied to face each challenge as it arises, from raising enough money to cover venue fees and other costs associated with the program (they’ve started a “GoFundMe” crowd-sourced funding campaign) to managing negative comments from detractors who feel the event is a popularity contest or that it isn’t a comprehensive or accurate representation of Lexington’s music scene.
“There’s no book that’s been published called ‘How to Do an Awards Show in Your Town,’” said Parrish. She admits that, like many of those questioning the official list of nominees, even she and McLean weren’t familiar with many of the artists who made the final list (the two organizers were excluded from nominating or voting). She sees that as a good thing – a suggestion that Lexington’s overall music scene is vaster and stronger than any individual clique or micro-scene. Nominations were open to the public, with the final “official” nominee list culled to include the top four vote-getters in each category. Individual nominees (or a representative from each band that was nominated) then became the “academy” of sorts, and were asked to vote on a winner in each category from that list of nominees. Those votes will determine the winners, which will be announced at the award ceremony.
“The vision is to not do a pure popularity contest like the American Music Awards, and we also didn’t want something that’s super exclusive like the Grammys, which excludes huge chunks of the industry,” said McLean, who has tried to make the process as transparent as possible by communicating regularly with the “Lexington Music Awards” Facebook group, which now has more than 800 members. Ultimately, he sees the event as a chance to celebrate a small handful of the musicians and music industry members who contribute to Lexington’s music culture.
“Whether they are really ‘the best’ isn’t the thing, because that’s all subjective anyway,” he said.
The challenge of balancing popularity with legitimate talent is a sentiment that Kathy Hinkebein, organizer of the Louisville Music Awards, which started in 2013, appreciates as well.
“You want the public involved, but then you run the risk of the perceived ‘popularity contest,’” said Hinkebein in an email. The LMAs employ a large and diverse “academy” of about 50 members from radio, clubs, promoters, publicists, music professors, music writers, engineers and others who are invested in the local music community.
“We have had pushback and we have had our share of negative comments,” Hinkebein said, adding that while they had a couple of nominees ask to be withdrawn the first year, no one asked to be withdrawn the second year of the LMAs. “In the end, most people know that we are trying to do something good for everyone. That's all we can do.”
McLean, who researched several other music awards ceremonies in the region and around the country for inspiration and guidance, says that one connecting force he has found among them is the underlying sentiment that these events have helped bring together and unite seemingly disparate factions of each individual music scene.
Parrish, who had never even met McLean before she signed up to volunteer her efforts toward the event, saw the potential from day one.
“I see it growing and evolving and being something that is something this town and this city and this state will hopefully eventually be very very proud of,” she said. “There’s so much talent and this is a chance for that to be celebrated – for us to come together for the public to see what’s in the city that they don’t know about.”
IF YOU GO
Lexington Music Awards
Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015
6 p.m.
Lyric Theatre, 300 E. Third St.