The Norman Music Festival is a big deal.

Organized by the Norman Arts Council, the festival began last year with around 30 bands and 15,000 attendants.

This year, festival organizers are looking to one-up themselves in a big way, with 95 performers playing across 12 stages around Main Street. By spotlighting local and national musicians, poets, artists and comedians, the Arts Council is doing something truly momentous: showing Norman, and the country, that this city is a place thriving with local talent and a zeal for the arts that makes Norman one of the top places for artistic expression in the country.

To the local artists who have been working hard in Norman, some for decades, making quality music and art is not new information. But for some Norman community members who may have been too busy or disinterested to catch Mamma Sweet at the Deli, read a review of Dorian Small or check out comedy night at Othello’s on occasion, the Norman Music Festival will be a breathtakingly enlightening experience.

I remember at last year’s festival, as I waited for the epic Polyphonic Spree to emerge from the scarlet veil they had drawn across the stage, I felt an overwhelming sense of awe. Thousands of people had congregated there, at that place, at that moment, to enjoy a concert in the middle of the street, the same street on which we drive to work, eat a sandwich or buy a record on any other day. To me the veil symbolized the veil through which a lot of us generally look at Norman—a place in which we live, work, go to school, and dream of one day leaving.

But Norman is more than a mundane workweek, campus bars and OU students arduously working toward a degree. It goes deeper.

The heart of Norman contains all of those things, but it also has artists and musicians who work very hard to give back to the community with their creativity. It takes something like the Norman Music Festival to show this. The sense of community I felt last year was inspiring. This is where I live, I thought. And I’m proud to live here, too.

This year, the second annual Norman Music Festival will likely blow last year’s out of the water. It is one of the eight music festivals featured on Pandora.com, the premier playlist music site on the Internet. Some of the biggest indie rock bands in the country, like Of Montreal, will be here too.

But forget that for a moment. The bigger bands and the hype aren’t the best part of the festival.

The local organization, Citizens to Recycle the Environment, or CORE, will be using some of its new recycling bins for public events for the first time. Local businesses throughout downtown Norman will be proudly showcasing their products to a wider range of people than ever before. And people young and old will come out on Saturday to enjoy some music and each other’s company.

That is what’s truly amazing about the Norman Music Festival.

It fosters a sense of community in Norman. This community was here the whole time, but it often becomes veiled by our banal look on the world, which can happen so easily when you forget to pay attention.

On Saturday, our sense of community will shine through with kaleidoscopic colors. Norman will make a statement and reaffirm that it is indeed a place of diversity, excitement and real community, which will resonate on a local and national level, hopefully showing Norman in a light many people haven’t seen before.