Live outdoor music is back, Lexington, and nobody’s happier about that than the bands

With the return of warm weather and the easing of the pandemic, Lexington music venues are resuming live events.

The Burl said on social media that it’s moving most of its shows outside for the season beginning this month.

To get spring rolling: A triple bill at The Burl that includes Letters of Acceptance.

The easy summation in describing Letters of Acceptance is that it is a band comprised of members living in Lexington and Louisville. But like the pop sounds the quartet has created over the past four years, such a description overlooks the kind of detail crucial to understanding its identity, not to mention the miles and time involved in establishing it. In fact, to fully appreciate how the band came to be, you almost need a road map.

The story begins with a split. Despite a friendship already established along with a mutual appreciation of contemporary pop and rock inspirations, Nicholasville native John Harlan Norris and Louisvillian Clinton Harlin Newman went in very different directions. A visual artist, Norris moved Arkansas to teach painting. Newman, at the same time, headed north, winding up in a series of New York bands that included The Mendoza Line and Bird of Youth.

After a decade apart and a dose of serendipity, both wound up back in the Bluegrass with an aim to forge their pop preferences into a sound and band of their own.

“Clint and I have been friends for, like, 20 years,” Norris said. “We’re both from Kentucky and both had wanted to be in a band together a long time ago. Then we ended up moving to different parts of the country for many years but just happened to come back to Kentucky at the same time. That’s when we started making a lot of recordings on our own and built up a real backlog of material.”

A few duo performances grew out their collaborations. In short order, though, they felt a need to establish Letters of Acceptance as a fully operational band. That’s when a rhythm section of veteran Lexington artists – bassist Scott Whiddon and drummer Tim Welch – stepped in.

“I ran into Scott at one of those outdoor shows at Al’s (Bar),” Norris said. “In another sort of slightly serendipitous thing, Scott and I both lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at the same time many years ago when we were going to grad school at LSU. We had separate bands down there. We shared a couple of bills together and knew each other very peripherally in those days, but then we reconnected up here and just started talking about music. Everything just flowed naturally from that. Once we started talking about playing together, Scott said, ‘I know the perfect drummer for you. And by the way, he’s your neighbor.’ So I came to realize Tim lives on the same block as me. There were all these strange connections.”

Two friends working in different states. An unexpected return home at the same time. An ally from another era and locale. A new acquaintance who turns out to be a neighbor. Few bands have had more members criss-crossing each other before actually forming a lineup than Letters of Acceptance. By 2017, the quartet was set. A year later, live shows commenced with Norris now living in Lexington and Newman remaining in Louisville.

“That means Clint has to drive to practice, unfortunately,” Norris added.

Many of the band’s performances are scheduled around the release of a recording – not a full length album, but usually a two-or-three song EP or a single.

“It’s so, I don’t know, amorphous the way people release music now. We just enjoy being able to put out a single now and then without knowing exactly where it’s all going to go,” Norris said. “We may compile it or add it to an album later, but it’s been fun so far to link those songs to shows we have coming up.”

The band’s April 9 performance will coincide with the release of a new single called “Take All the Time That You Need.” Like much of Letters of Acceptance’s music so far, it is steeped into the melodic efficiency of modern pop, minus the pomp and gloss.

“When Clint and I start first started to become friends, we would just kind of nerd out over different kinds of guitar-based music. We both liked music that was pop oriented and had pop structures, but also a homemade quality in terms of the way it was recorded. The music was not necessarily polished the way radio pop is. A band we really dug on early on when we first started talking about music and thought about maybe playing music together was The Go Betweens, an Australian band. We really liked them because there are two songwriters in the band and their songs are very pop, but the arrangements are also very skeletal. They were recorded in sort of slapdash ways. It’s not super polished music, but it’s still melodic with clever lyrics.”

Norris is also quick to point out that despite its love of recording, Letters of Acceptance has missed greatly the experience of playing live as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This weekend will be its first public performance since playing at an abbreviated Tahlsound Festival outdoor show in October. As such, Norris welcomes being part of a triple bill of local acts this weekend at The Burl.

“I remember at Tahlsound, it felt so good to see some familiar faces, meet some new people and just remember how meaningful it can be to play music in a large setting – to just interact in person. There has been such a small amount of that for everyone that we should realize how important it is.”

The Fanged Robot, Letters of Acceptance and Bear Medicine perform outdoors at The Burl, 375 Thompson Rd. at 8 p.m. April 9. Tickets are $75 for tables seating six patrons. For more information, go to theburlky.com.