Art by Zeke Barbaro
For a lot of people, last year s Austin Music Awards is time-stamped as the final public outing they enjoyed before the pandemic hit.
Back in the fall, when we first started talking about this year s AMAs, we sure liked the idea of the 2021 ceremony marking a kind of welcome back to being together again, a post-vaccine party to celebrate getting through a grueling 12 months. What sweet symmetry that might have been.
It wasn t meant to be.
Austin Chronicle Music Poll? Same thing everybody else has been doing this past year: We got crazy creative.
Music Editor Raoul Hernandez and staff writer Kevin Curtin cooked up a marvelous idea – why not bombard winners at their own homes, Publishers Clearing House-style? The idea grew from there (oversized prop checks were a must, naturally). Our marketing and art departments got busy building it out. Our friends at Arts + Labor came on as creative collaborators. The participation of the Society for the
Illustration by Zeke Barbaro
The
40th Annual Austin Music Awards will be presented this coming week – Monday through Thursday, March 1-4 – unfolding across four full days, COVID-safe, but live and in person (mostly), at multiple venues around town. How are we doing that? Look for details to be announced starting
Monday at xpm on your favorite social media channels. (It s so secret, I can t even tell you the start time.)
Last year s AMA show was Austin s last big party before the COVID shutdown; next year live music will be back to normal and we ll be celebrating that. But this year is something completely different. Thanks to
Jackie Venson and Chris Cubas hosting the 2019/2020 Austin Music Awards last March at ACL Live at the Moody Theater (Photo by David Brendan Hall)
For hundreds of locals, the 2019/2020 Austin Music Awards transpired as the last big show they attended before life turned upside down.
Wednesday, March 11, 2020, ACL Live at the Moody Theater: We were so naive, passing joints backstage on the Willie s Place balcony while getting and giving all the hugs and handshakes you could ever desire and living in utter denial of how bad the COVID-19 pandemic would soon become. City officials canceled South by Southwest the Friday previously, but venues worked to host unofficial shows and bands planned on playing them.