NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — There's a new music festival coming to Nashville this weekend, and the headliners are hosting it at Lipscomb as a nod to their roots.
"We started in college at Lipscomb here in Nashville. We were just a group of choir students on campus singing in the ensembles in the music department, and we just started getting together to play for fun and swap around some songs that we had written on our own," Lincoln Mick, one of the lead singers and mandolin player for The Arcadian Wild, said.
The Arcadian Wild is a "bluegrass adjacent" band, in the words of Mick. Fellow band members are Isaac Horn, guitar player, and Bailey Zahurancik, fiddle player.
They are hosting Wild Bison Festival, starting at 12:00 p.m on Saturday, March 23. It's a free music festival for anyone to attend at Lipscomb in Bison Square — but Mick says the band hopes it will especially be a chance to have creative, relational conversations with the students.
When he and Horn went to Lipscomb, he said there weren't as many opportunities as there are now for students interested in music.
"The music program at Lipscomb has really exploded and they've developed all these new degree tracks," Mick said. "We were hoping to make something that's neat, both for us to step back into, and also celebrate the trajectory of where the school of music and the college of the arts has evolved into, so we're excited," Mick said.
For their latest record "Welcome," The Arcadian Wild used a new distribution company in Nashville called Vere Music, and the people who run Vere — Rusty Harmon and Paige Heineman — are a big reason why the festival is happening, according to Mick.
Harmon works at Lipscomb, and a couple of months into working with The Arcadian Wild, he floated the idea of doing the festival there. He then started the conversations with faculty and staff at Lipscomb, as well as some students from the college of the arts, to help make it come to life — alongside The Arcadian Wild's manager, Andrew Stokes.
The main stage will have six acts — Nordista Freeze, Taylor Leonhardt, Down River Collective, Oh Jeremiah, Jac Thompson and, of course, The Arcadian Wild. Other acts include Elaina Christina, Logan & Ava, Logan & Ava, Jonnie, River & Rail and Hello Darling.
It's a free event, since its in its first year and its still very much an experiment, Mick said. He mentioned just how much work goes into the making of a festival — calling it a "hospitality machine." He hopes the festival can be recurring event tied to the heart of the community at Lipscomb, and is excited to make good music with good friends this time around.
"We just kind of wanted to have a really fun day with people we know and love, and I think we're partly really proud of our friends, and we love taking every opportunity to share them with our extended community," Mick said.
You can find more information on all of the people performing on their instagram page.
Fostering Hope provides Christmas for kids in foster care. I'm delighted to see Fostering Hope expand this year to expand their reach to now include kids in Foster care in metro AND foster kids in East TN hard hit by Helene.
-Bree Smith
