Ah Nashville, Tenn. a.k.a Music City, where you can only go a short distance to feel the waves of this small city’s ocean of creativity, and still manage to avoid the popular, yet drunken and traffic plagued downtown. From live music every night to local parks open to performances on weekends, it’s pretty difficult to miss what’s happening.
This year Nashville will be introducing a new event to its ever-growing weekend vibes. SoundHarvest music festival will be kicking off this weekend. Blending national acts with local color, the festival will feature groups such as The Flaming Lips, The Weeks, and Goodbye June while rising Nashville acts such as Vinyl Thief, Cardboard Kids and Easy Roscoe take the local stage.
Recently, we had the chance to chat with SoundHarvest director Monica Copciac, who also serves as the creative director for Bluewater Music. Monica opened up about SoundHarvest’s debut year, the lineup, and what may be to come for this brand new festival.
What has lead you to this moment, becoming the director for SoundHarvest?
I graduated from Middle Tenn. State University with a degree in music business and interned with multiple firms in the industry, which lead to my job with Bluewater Music Group. It’s been a series of events leading up to this. I started in copyright administration, and last October the position for creative director opened up, so I put my name in the hat and they let me do it which was amazing, because some companies don’t let you move laterally in job positioning. They took a chance on me, and I had been working on SoundHarvest before applying so it became my pet project, and here we are today.
Is this one of your first experiences taking on a role as a festival director? Or have you worked on similar large projects.
This is my first one, surprisingly enough (laughs). It’s new for most of us, and it’s my first big experience like this, so I’m just doing it.”
Something special about this festival is the balance of big headliners with rising local talent, how did this come together?
There’s such a cool music scene in Nashville, and it’s just saturated with talent. Everywhere you go, there’s just an amazing band around the corner. So, we wanted to be able to showcase that. I mean, why not pull from the pool of talent in Nashville? It just makes sense to use our resources here, and I think it’s a great chance for these groups to play with national acts and grow their opportunities. It’s not a way to just showcase Nashville talent, but rather local talent.
What do you think festival goers will look forward to the most for this event?
Well we have a lot different things going on that day, besides the music. We also have some art installations, different activities throughout the day to nurture those festival vibes. There also may be some special, I don’t know, I’m not sure, but we’ll see what happens…
What were some of your goals for SoundHarvest this year?
Other than showcasing the rising rock scene in Nashville, which was one of our primary goals, we wanted to create a cool representation of Nashville as a whole. The culture is growing so much; not only is the music scene growing, but the food scene is growing, so is beer, art, everything is happening here. We wanted to give Nashvillians an opportunity to show other people outside of Nashville what’s happening here. We wanted to create that blend of national and local.
Will you be directing again next year, and will there be any changes?
We’re already planning for next year and I plan on being here to help improve it so we can get better and better. We’re hoping to have it on multiple days so more people can come and enjoy it, so we’ll be making more decisions after this year’s SoundHarvest ends. This is also the first kind of major festival ever hosted in Centennial Park, so we’re proud to pioneer this and hope we’ll be able to perform there for years to come.
I’d also like to add that none of this is possible without our partners, we’ve been working with great people and a fantastic team. I wish I could name them all but Lightning 100 has been incredibly helpful, Nashville Scene, and Musicians Corner have been wonderful. There have been so many people behind this every step of the way and we can’t be grateful enough for all of them. I hope we can keep our partners for years to come and it’s been such unique experience.
You can check out the schedule
here as well as purchase day passes.
