Touting more than 250 acts across three days on stages indoors and out (weather permitting), Norman Music Fest gives visitors a chance to relive the pre-algorithm days when you found out about new music by just kind of happening upon it. As fans of the continuation of live music as a general concept, we recommend wandering around, listening for cool-sounding noises, figuring out who is making them and giving them money to encourage them to keep doing that. But if you prefer a more curated playlist, we highly recommend seeing some of the standout acts we’ve covered in the past few months: Stepmom, Lust Online, Rainbows Are Free and Original Flow & The Wavves are all worth your time and attention.
We’ve also taken this opportunity to catch up with a couple more hometown heavy hitters. Lend them your ears, too, and like a bunch of Ebeneezer Scrooges in band shirts, let’s vow to honor live music in our hearts and try to keep it all the year.
The human part
OKC hip-hop artist K.O. (sheisko.com), scheduled to perform on the main stage at 8:20 p.m. on Friday, April 25, released All Is Well in March. It’s her 10th album, and she said it’s also probably her “most human.”
“I’m really taking the time to understand life, like growing up,” K.O. said. “My mom is sick. I’m trying to figure out how to make sure all these bills get paid. I have real-life things going on, and I think sometimes in music, we forget to show the human part.”
Beginning with an affirmation that “everything is working out” for the “highest good” even when problems arise, the opening title track finds K.O. contemplative: “God gave me style / God gave me grace … I’m the one that’s meant to win the race,” she says, but later reflects, “I gave and gave until there was nothing left for me.” Closing victory lap “Ask Xavier” boasts “My word’s the gospel / Speak the truth / I’m not a savior / Looked in the mirror, set some goals and I obtained them,” but also counts the cost: “I traded all my peace of mind to be the greatest.” In between, K.O. chronicles heartbreaks, disappointments and “Delusions,” rapping in a confident but confessional tone and singing her own emotive hooks. “I just miss the way you used to lie to me,” she sings on “Lie to Me,” which forms a thematic suite about one-sided feelings and ill-advised hook-ups with the brief but beautiful torch song “Remember,” eager “Touch It” and bitter “Delusions.” On “I Prayed for Rain,” she seeks spiritual meaning in life’s struggles.
The subject matter may be deeper, but K.O. said her artistic standards have remained consistent throughout her discography.
“The quality of the music never changes,” K.O. said. “I feel like if you find me at album one or if you find me at album 10, this is good music. I think that’s the part that’s not debatable.”
K.O. has performed at Norman Music Fest several times, but this will be her first appearance on the main stage.
“You work so hard. You do those small clubs and those side stages for years on years on years to finally get this opportunity,” K.O. said.
Fans who’ve been following K.O. for years will hear some old favorites along with newer tracks, she said, and new fans will have the chance to catch up.
“I’m digging in the crates,” K.O. said. “I’m coming from the top and bringing you to where I’m at now. It’s a story line. That’s what it feels like.”
Survivor’s guilt
Scheduled to take the west stage at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 26, War Mothershed (soundcloud.com/warmothershed) released his most recent single “John Wick” in March.
Featuring Ace Da God and Raheem, the menace-dripping battle track brags “I ain’t scared of the Boogeyman, I’m John Wick … Baba Yaga can die too.”
“Very excited about that one,” Mothershed said. “All three of us, we’re just big Keanu Reeves fans. … This is a track that I produced, engineered and created myself. This is all from scratch really.”
Mothershed has been making music for more than 15 years, but he began producing some of his own beats in 2023.
“Because I can, I definitely should,” he said. “It empowers me to do a lot more than before. … The biggest issue that I’ve found as an artist trying to get out there was waiting on other people to finish my music, more or less, whether it’s a producer working on a beat or an engineer working on the vocals and mixing and mastering. Of course, you have to deal with everybody else’s schedules, personalities, their inputs … but once you learn how to produce and really do everything yourself, you don’t have to wait for anybody else.”
In addition to making scheduling easier, creating his own beats gives him more freedom to explore creatively.
“It’s definitely allowed me to expand not only my self-image as an artist, but my own ideas as far as what music could be used or worked with in a way,” Mothershed said. “It’s really opened up a lot of avenues for me.”
“Letters to Bisan,” the song Mothershed plans to close his set with, is named for Bisan Owda, a filmmaker known for covering the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip on social media. The song describes the survivor’s guilt Mothershed felt after accidentally shooting himself while getting ready for work as an armed security guard.
“My pistol, while still in the holster, fell on the ground, and it discharged into me,” Mothershed said. “And so I had broken two ribs. I had lost part of my lung, liver, my diaphragm. They had to reconstruct my colon, and then it broke my left shoulder blade before it went out into the ceiling. … I spent easily eight days in the hospital. I had two major surgeries, and I lost four and a half pints of blood. But all of that was going on while I was following what’s going on in the Middle East with Israel and with Palestine. I just felt so connected to one of the journalists, Bisan, because she’s roughly my age. She’s very passionate, of course, active with her people in her community, and I feel very similar to that. So I was just very remorseful and in I guess a vulnerable place of like, ‘Wow. It’s unfortunate that I’m getting the help that I am because I’m 7,000 miles this way, and had I been 7,000 miles that way, I could have been in a completely other situation.’”
The song describes Mothershed’s thought process as he recovers from his own accident and imagines the state of constant fear in Gaza, concluding with a sample of Owda delivering her signature greeting, “This is Bisan from Gaza, and I’m still alive.”
Recovering from a lung injury presents additional challenges to a musician, but Mothershed said he’s coming back stronger than before.
“It’s honestly so weird when I say this, but I felt like this accident had to happen so I could learn how to breathe fully,” Mothershed said. “They talk about it a lot with babies that they just naturally know how to breathe with their diaphragm, but after mimicking us and the way that we breathe, they unlearn that, and so they just breathe primarily with their chest or their lungs. I had to build my diaphragm back up and use my core. Getting back in shape was, of course, a struggle, but I almost feel like I have better cardio than I did before. I may not have the same strength and stability in all my joints and things like that, but my cardio feels great.”
This article appears in OKC Ballet Shorts.