Readers of 2024 album-of-the-year lists and Oklahoma Gazette will find several familiar names in this year’s lineup for Norman Music Festival.
La Luz (laluzband.com) — scheduled to take the festival’s main stage at 9:50 p.m. on Saturday, April 26 — made multiple year-end lists for its fifth album News of the Universe. Awarding the album four-and-a-half stars out of five, London’s Far Out magazine said songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Shana Cleveland “turns the world-shattering experience of a cancer diagnosis into poignant observations about the inevitability and universality of decay, approaching the impossible with poise” but added that her “open lyrics and gentle delivery” and the music’s hints of “soft, 1960s psychedelia” create an ambiance that’s “cosmic and cozy all at once.”
OKC’s Jabee (iamjabee.bandcamp.com) is scheduled to share the west stage with Mello Music Group label mate Apollo Brown (apollobrown360.bandcamp.com) at 11 p.m. Saturday, April 26. Detroit producer Brown created the beats for two tracks on Jabee’s The Spirit Is Willing, But the Flesh Is Weak, released in October. Speaking to the Gazette in December, Jabee said the album’s “message is that no matter what, I really want to always strive to do what’s right, but I fall short,” and though his music is not necessarily religious, he said he creates with a higher power and historical perspective in mind: “How is this going to look in the eyes of God? How will this sound in 10 years? How is this going to sound if my kids hear it? How will this sound whenever I’m old when I’m not rapping any more? How is this going to make me feel?”
In March, Brown released Elevator Music, an instrumental collection HotNewHipHop called “an immersive sonic experience that captures the delicate balance between refinement and raw emotion … drawing listeners into moments of contemplation and nostalgia.”
Austin’s Being Dead (beingdead.bandcamp.com) is scheduled to play the main stage at 8:20 p.m. Saturday, April 26. The band’s 2024 sophomore release EELS made several year-end lists including Pitchfork, PopMatters, AllMusic and Paste, which said the band belongs “to a long lineage of subversive pop-rock wizards who are not only capable of writing great songs, but also willing to then keep pushing those songs into interesting, unexpected places,” including “shimmering dream-pop,” “prickly post-punk with echoes of the Beatles,” “candlelit folk” and “wonderfully simple jangle-pop.”
Master of Ceremonies
Tulsa’s Branjae (branjaemusic.com) is scheduled to perform on the main stage at 9:30 p.m. on Friday, April 25. She’s currently working on Master of Ceremonies, a 15-minute short film “centered around mental health” and accompanied by a soundtrack album.
“Making this film has been a challenge,” Branjae said. “I’ve had to live it a little bit because I get inspiration from life and experience … and I was going through my own mental health crisis and just sort of working my way through it, so finding the inspiration to actually finish the script, finish the story, took a while. … It was a challenge within itself to get through that in a real way and be able to create this masterpiece that I feel like it is.
“I think it’s going to speak volumes to people. People will relate, but it’s done in such a creative way where it’s not depressing … It’s actually going to be entertaining and colorful and bright.”
Branjae portrays two characters in the film: the protagonist and her alter ego MC, a “circus-jester type … kind of cringe a little bit.”
Though Master of Ceremonies will be Branjae’s longest and most ambitious project to date, music videos are an important component of her art. The video for “Too Much” from 2024 EP Intravibronic was an official selection for deadCenter and several other film festivals, as was the video for “Free Facts,” featuring dystopian sci-fi imagery evoking Logan’s Run and Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer.
“It’s this whole world of people who live in a controlled environment, and one person has to set herself free, which allows her to set everyone else free,” Branjae said.
For Branjae, these short films offer an opportunity to further explore her music’s meaning and themes.
“I definitely like to take on the storytelling aspect of music videos,” Branjae said, “because I’m really big on messaging in the music, like, ‘What are we talking about? When I’m writing, when I’m singing, when I’m performing, what is the message that I want people to walk away with? What is it that I want them to see or learn or be open to?’”
In the future, Branjae plans to draw on her “theater kid” background to expand her visual storytelling in her live performances as well.
“I really like incorporating the costume changes and the visuals and the props and things like that in the live show,” Branjae said. “I’ve done a lot of that in the past, but I’m looking forward to amping it up even more once we get into the next phase of the live music once the film comes out.”
Adding theatrical elements to live performance presents extra difficulties, but for Branjae, that’s kind of the point.
“I love a challenge,” Branjae said. “If I start feeling nervous again on stage, that’s a good sign that I’m doing something challenging, and challenging resistance is growth. … I don’t want to give people the same old show that they’ve always seen.”
True grit
OKC’s Mallory Eagle (malloryeagle.com) — scheduled to perform on the Gray Street stage at 10 p.m. Saturday, April 26 — released sophomore album Neon Waltz in 2024. In the years between her 2018 debut Red Dirt Home and its followup, Eagle moved from Oklahoma to Nashville and back again, discovering new aspects of her art and herself on tour and in the studio.
“I definitely went through a massive change internally and externally,” Eagle said. “I think I learned the true way of professionalism in the music industry and the business of it. I’ve always been an artist in my heart and soul, but applying the business side of it was a new venture … and I became a lot stronger as a musician because I had to really step up.”
Working as a rhythm guitarist and backup vocalist in Music City challenged Eagle but also gave her the opportunity to bring “Red Dirt energy into some of the Nashville sound spaces.”
“It’s like cooking, you know. You’ve got, like, all kinds of different seasonings,” Eagle said. “And I think the seasoning that Oklahoma brings has a little bit more grit to it. … It just has its own medicine.”
Though she incorporates ingredients from Red Dirt and the Nashville sound, Eagle grew up listening to blues, soul and disco along with country music and draws inspiration from Willie Nelson, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch and other artists who create their own styles from disparate elements and traditions.
Neon Waltz closes with a cover of “Blue Skies,” an Irving Berlin standard that was more than 50 years old when Nelson included it on his 1978 album Stardust.
“I’ve always loved the song and felt so connected to it,” Eagle said. “There are many sides of blue. I’m looking outside right now, and we’ve got a beautiful light blue sky with no clouds, but then also the color of the sky at night, that deep indigo. … There’s still beauty within the darkness of it, so I wanted to play in that realm of positive and negative, the duality of that. And I think it’s also kind of was what I was dealing with inside as well … finding balance with maybe masculine and feminine energy, finding a balance within myself. We don’t have to be a warrior all the time. We have to find the strength within the peace, but then you have to find the softness, you have to find the fire. … I want it to be a song of freedom for people to remember that we have wings and the sky is open for us. Even if we’re flying low sometimes, we’re still flying.”
This article appears in OKC Ballet Shorts.