The Capital Region Eddies Music Awards Announces 2021 Nominees

Live music ground to a halt in the Capital Region in March 2020 and while few artists were able to perform in local venues for the remainder of the year, many were active recording and streaming shows online. The organizers of the Capital Region Thomas  

Edison Music Awards have announced this year’s nominees with a pandemic-influenced slate of existing and new categories.  

The 2021 Eddies Music Awards ceremony will be held at 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 14 at Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs. The show features several live musical performances, award announcements, and acceptance speeches. The slate of musical performers will be announced soon.  

This is the second installment of the Eddies Music Awards in 2021; the current slate of nominees represents the work of 2020. The work of 2019 was recognized during a live broadcast from UPH this May after two postponements due to the pandemic.  

“About half of the categories we presented in previous years were scuttled when looking at 2020,” said Sal Prizio, Eddies co-founder and co-producer. “We took a poll of judges and there was near-unanimous agreement that the genre categories such as best folk artist and best hard rock artist didn’t make sense, as so much of the assessment in  those categories was based on live performance.” 

“So, we worked with the judges on new categories to reflect the reality of 2020,” said co-founder and co-producer Jim Murphy. “Naturally streaming dominated those and, in the end, we ended up with fewer categories than the previous years.” 

One new category this year is the Eddies Special Merit Award. Murphy and Prizio said they have been considering it for two years because there were some individuals and organizations that deserved recognition though their efforts weren’t easily categorized.  The circumstances of 2020 “necessitated adding it,” they both said.  

Eddies Music Awards judges nominated 15 individuals and organizations for the Merit Award and several will be honored for their achievements at the award ceremony. The criteria given to the judges was to honor “an individual, artist or organization who during  2020 either made unique, exceptional contribution(s) to the local music scene, or overcame great adversity while contributing to the local music scene, or reinvented their  approach to their music career to sustain themselves during the pandemic.” 

Prior to the Eddies Music Awards, the Eddies Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony for seven new inductees will be held Wednesday, Oct. 27 at UPH. The ceremony will feature live musical performances and tributes to the inductees. Scheduled to perform are artists playing the inductees’ music: Dylan Perillo; Sean Wendell; BROWN LIQUOR SOCIAL CLUB featuring Chris Dollard and J Yager; and Peter Pashoukos. 

Tickets for the Eddies Music Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Oct. 27 and the  Eddies Music Awards on Nov. 14 are now on sale at universalpreservationhall.org. For more information on both, visit theeddiesawards.com.  

The Eddies Music Awards, the Eddies Music Hall of Fame, and Universal Preservation Hall are a part of Proctors Collaborative.  

There are the nominees for the 2021 Eddies Music Awards: