The Backyard Is Loaded: What the CPMAs Told Us About Central PA Right Now
Every music town needs a night where it looks at itself in the mirror. For this one, that night was March 4, when the Central Pennsylvania Music Awards took over the American Music Theatre and read out a roll call of a scene that is, by any fair measure, thriving. Five months on, with summer in full swing, the winners' list still works as a field guide to who you should be seeing live.
Start at the top. The Jellybricks' Dreaming in Stereo took Album of the Year, while Samaritan Snare's Living Statue won EP of the Year — a veteran-and-upstart split that captures the range on offer. Zoey Noble, of Columbia, was named Best New Artist, the kind of honor that tends to precede a busy couple of years. And Conrad Fisher, the alt-country songwriter and Intercourse native, doubled up, winning both Alt Country and Songwriter — proof that the valley's roots-music bench runs genuinely deep.
The venue vote matters too: Tellus360 was named Best Live Music Venue, formalizing what anyone who's climbed its seven bars already suspected. And the Hall of Fame class added ballast — Lancaster's own The Couriers, dream-pop institution The Ocean Blue, The Chicks' Martie Maguire, Bill Fisher, and Eddie Rambeau — a reminder that this region's musical roots run decades deep, not just to the last club that closed.
What the awards can't fully capture is the connective tissue growing between the trophies and the stages. Exhibit A: the Ware Center's "Lancaster Loves" series, Millersville University's downtown arts hub turning its glass-pyramid Atrium into a cabaret room dedicated entirely to local acts — a spiritual successor to the beloved old Club 42 nights. Its inaugural bill paired Harrisburg pop duo DANDY, brothers Cory and Jordan Dandy, with blues-soul mainstay Corty Byron's Corty & the Light. "There is so much incredible talent right in our backyard," Ware Center director Robin Zaremski said of the impulse behind it. A presenting series built only for locals is exactly how a scene compounds.
Put it together and a pattern emerges. The corridor has the veterans (Jellybricks, The Couriers), the breakouts (Zoey Noble), the genre depth (Fisher's roots-country, DANDY's pop, Byron's blues), the crowning venue (Tellus360), and now an institution deliberately built to give homegrown artists a marquee. That's not a farm team. That's a functioning economy of sound.
So here's the assignment for the back half of summer: pick one name off the CPMA list you've never seen live, and go. The awards did the scouting. All that's left is showing up — which, in a valley this loud, has never been easier.
The backyard is loaded. Stop admiring it from the porch.
Sources: 2026 Central Pennsylvania Music Awards winners; Ware Center launches "Lancaster Loves" series