Culture
Virtual Nelsonville Music Festival Interviews: Lydia Loveless
By: Emily Votaw
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“Love Is Not Enough,” the heart-wrenching leading single from Lydia Loveless’ forthcoming fourth full-length, Daughter, (and the first she’s released on her own label, Honey, You’re Gonna Be Late) feels like a lesson in dire emotional truths.
“I know when I was putting together my thoughts about the themes of the record I was trying to not come across as too, you know, angry, white feminist lady because I think it’s a little more of a delicate record, and I certainly wasn’t trying to ham fistedly yell at anyone,” Loveless tells me just about a week and a half out the Virtual Nelsonville Music Festival, which she has submitted a performance of three songs off of Daughter to. “Certainly right now there are a lot of women and marginalized people treated as property sort of as opposed to individuals — and I think that was just kind of brewing in me the whole time I was working on the record: thinking about what I can do personally for myself to make myself feel less like someone’s property or relation or object and find some more individualism in myself; which is definitely something I have been exploring over the past several years.”
Listen to my interview with Loveless, embedded above, and look for her contribution to the Virtual Nelsonville Music Festival August 21-22 streaming on Stuart’s Opera House.
Early on in the COVID-19 crisis, the 2020 Nelsonville Music Festival announced its cancellation due to the infectious disease outbreak. In its place, Ohio University School of Media Arts & Studies Director Josh Antonuccio and Nelsonville Music Festival Executive Director Tim Peacock created the Virtual Nelsonville Music Festival, an online presentation of the popular festival, which is being produced by Stuart’s Opera House, WOUB Public Media, the Scripps College of Communication and the Ohio University School of Media Arts and Studies, in partnership with OU Performing Arts, the Ohio University Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Haden DeRoberts Foundation. Under the direction of Antonuccio, Ohio University students and recent graduates are on location around the region with school faculty Andie Walla and Brian Plow filming performances for the virtual fundraiser supporting Stuart’s Opera House. WOUB producers Adam Rich and Evan Shaw are providing post-production on the project, which will go live on Stuart’s official YouTube page August 21-22.