They’re hoping it’ll be Charlotte’s biggest, boldest music festival ever. Will it work?

News of the first three Lovin’ Life Music Fest headliners was delivered in mid-December, dropped into the inboxes and social-media feeds of live-music fans during a dead time for top-tier Charlotte-area concerts like an overstuffed holiday surprise.

Post Malone? Stevie Nicks? Noah Kahan?

Even if you aren’t familiar with any of those A-list recording artists, odds are someone in your household is.

And anyone who knows all three of them couldn’t have been blamed for reacting to the announcement of their bookings by thinking, Whoa. For real?

“People asked us that. Like, ‘Is this a scam?’” says Bob Durkin, co-founder of Southern Entertainment, the Charlotte-based event and production company behind the ambitious multi-genre festival that is scheduled to take place May 3-5 in and around First Ward Park in uptown. He chuckles at the thought, then adds, “And — I hate saying the word, but — they asked me about Fyre Festival, and I go, ‘Listen —’”

His partner at Southern Entertainment, Rob Pedlow, laughs and lets out a groan. “Oh, don’t bring that up!”

“‘— go to Post Malone’s website,’” Durkin continues. “‘Post Malone’s website says he’s coming to Charlotte on this day. Stevie Nicks’ website, it’s this day.’ But yeah, I think we got a lot of that feedback that people were like, ‘Wow. You guys just punched everybody (with this announcement). Smacked people in the mouth.’”

It’s exactly the kind of buzz the longtime partners hoped that putting big, seemingly incongruous names on top of a multi-day bill would create.

One of the challenges moving forward through the winter, however, will be is sustaining that excitement into the spring, as they work to fill out the lineup and as their group tries to sell an estimated 30,000 tickets — a number they’ve been publicly using since the December launch as a proposed benchmark for success.

Then, of course, there’s this: While Durkin and Pedlow no longer have to worry about people wondering whether they’ve actually booked who they say they’ve booked, they certainly understand that a lot of those same folks are now wondering something else.

Will the Lovin’ Life Music Fest live up to the hype?

They’ve proven themselves in S.C., N.J.

This is by no means Durkin and Pedlow’s first time around the uptown-Charlotte block.

Partners in business here since the 1990s, they made names for themselves early on at the helm of Bar Management Group, which operated several nightlife hotspots of that era — including Dixie’s Tavern, Have A Nice Day Cafe, Bar Charlotte and The Hut.

In 2006, the pair was hired as consultants to the developer of Center City’s (now-defunct) EpiCentre, which at its peak was home to more than a dozen restaurants, bars and nightlife venues that they were directly responsible for bringing into the 100,000-square-foot complex.

But the most relevant experiences on their resumes have come from outside of North Carolina.

Under the umbrella of a separate company, Full House Productions, they debuted the three-day Carolina Country Music Festival in June 2015 on the boardwalk at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina with marquee names Eric Church and Lady Antebellum as headliners. The event has since become a summer staple for both country-music fans and artists; it has grown to four days, consistently sells out its 30,000 tickets, and this year (another sellout already), superstars Morgan Wallen and Carrie Underwood will top the bill.

Emboldened by that success, Durkin and Pedlow then tried to set up shop 600 miles up the East Coast in 2020 (this time as Southern Entertainment) with the attempted addition of another June country festival to their slate of events.

The inaugural Barefoot Country Music Fest — for which they’d landed Underwood — got postponed due to the pandemic, but it was an instant hit upon finally taking place the following year on the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey, over three days. It too has since expanded to four, and last June they estimated 30,000-plus fans per day. Luke Bryan and Keith Urban are set to headline in 2024.

As for Charlotte, Durkin and Pedlow say they’ve been daydreaming about bringing a multi-day, multi-genre music festival to town since the demise of the old CityFest Live!, which boasted Foo Fighters, Bob Dylan, Kid Rock and others during its 1998-to-2004 run.

They say the stars didn’t align to where they could focus their time and energies on actually trying to do it, however, until 2019.

By March 2020, they’d been in contact with Charlotte Center City Partners, which the previous year had unveiled an initiative called Music Everywhere CLT that had recommended Charlotte host a major music festival within five years; they’d had discussions with the city about getting a festival permit; and they even had been in contact with Post Malone’s team about the possibility of signing a booking agreement with the country/grunge/hip-hop/R&B star.

But then — far more prematurely than had happened with Barefoot — the event failed to launch due to COVID.

Piecing together a puzzle in Charlotte

After being absorbed with getting the Myrtle Beach and Wildwood festivals back on track in 2021 and 2022, the duo returned to the Charlotte idea in 2023.

Initially they eyed late April or early May of 2024 because of the increased likelihood of favorable weather, and they say they also purposefully tried to steer around other big-draw springtime events, including Speed Street and the Wells Fargo Championship golf tournament. (The dates they settled on, though, might seem curious to some. More on that in a minute.)

They scouted myriad possible locations.

“If there were 15 or 20 acres within 30 miles of where we are right now,” Durkin said over coffee inside The Market at 7th Street in uptown, “we looked at it.”

But they ultimately settled on a parking lot along Ninth Street between Brevard and Caldwell streets as the site for the main stage — and its environs, including First Ward Park, for two other stages and food, art and “experiential” vendor booths — because they felt being in Center City would put festival-goers in a sweet spot hospitality- and public transportation-wise.

In May 2023, they secured a permit for the 20-acre site a year out, for the May 3-5, 2024 weekend. After much back and forth, they were able to agree on a festival name, too, opting for simplistic words as opposed to something arcane like, say, Lollapalooza.

“We went over a zillion of ’em,” Pedlow says of the naming process. Adds Durkin: “Things that were a nod to this, or a nod to that ... but in general, it came down to, What does music feel like? When you’re sitting there at a concert and there’s 30,000 people doing the same thing you are and cranking tunes that give you this emotional recharge, you’re just lovin’ life.”

Their biggest coup, though, came a few months later — when they were able to book Post Malone, in large part on the strength of the reputations they’d built at the big beach fests. (Around the same time, folk-pop singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, who had a hit single with Malone last summer with “Dial Drunk,” signed on.) At that point, Durkin says he breathed “a sigh of relief, because I can tell people, ‘Post’s Malone’s playing,’ and it goes from a pull to a push.”

“It definitely helped us get at her,” Durkin adds in reference to Stevie Nicks, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and legendary Fleetwood Mac member who they booked in November.

With her on board, they say, they were ready to break the news to Charlotte and make tickets on sale in time for gift-giving season.

The cheapest ticket covers all three days — and costs just under $300.

‘A lot of faith to put into a promoter’

Since then, there have been two more waves of artist announcements.

Wave 2 featured Mt. Joy, Dominic Fike, Young the Giant, and Jessie Murph. Wave 3, announced last week, added Maggie Rogers, DaBaby, Dashboard Confessional, The Struts, and David Kushner.

Maybe only a couple acts across both waves qualify as true household names. Neither wave generated the same level of chatter as the first one. But there’s more to come, say Durkin and Pedlow, who from the beginning have promised a slate of 40-plus artists. (Many of those, of course, will be local and regional acts.) And while they decline to share ticket sales figures, Pedlow characterizes them as “robust.”

Still, not everyone is as enthusiastic or impressed at this point.

“I think it’s something that’s definitely needed in the city,” says Jeff Hahne, who’s been covering the Charlotte music scene since 2007 as a writer and photographer for various publications, “and I think anytime somebody tries to bring a festival in is a great idea. ... But they’re hoping for 30,000 people a day, and I’m thinking, Do these artists line up to that? I don’t know. ...

“I hope that there’s gonna be a few stronger additions at the top.”

Adds Courtney Devores, formerly a regular freelance music writer for The Charlotte Observer and now someone who talks to music lovers daily as a staffer at Charlotte’s Lunchbox Records: If you’re going to pay $300-$400 just for general-admission access, “that’s a lot of faith to put into a promoter that doesn’t seem to have their entire lineup confirmed. ...

“When we go to big three-day festivals like Bonnaroo or Coachella, we would know the entire lineup before we even purchased tickets.”

As a frame of reference, the three-day Shaky Knees Music Festival in Atlanta’s Central Park has already announced nearly 70 acts, including Foo Fighters, Weezer and Queens of the Stone Age. General-admission tickets for that fest, which was established in 2013 and has grown to annually draw about 40,000 fans, start at $100 more than Lovin’ Life.

Oh, and did we mention Shaky Knees’ dates overlap exactly with Lovin’ Life? (As do those for the more narrowly focused Breakaway Presents: Another World, a DJ- and electronic-music-heavy “bass festival” up the road at Charlotte Motor Speedway.)

Will it become an annual thing here?

For the record, though, Durkin and Pedlow actually think Shaky Knees helps them more than it competes with them.

Atlanta is 250 miles away from Charlotte, and all things being equal, the general-purpose live-music fan — if they’re going to pick between festivals — is going to pick the one that’s closer to home. That said, they’re not worried about Shaky Knees pulling anyone away except for the consumers who might be interested in a specific act that Shaky Knees has and Lovin’ Life doesn’t.

The upside, meanwhile, is that 250 miles is a stone’s throw for an bigger-name artist.

In fact, Noah Kahan is playing at Shaky Knees on May 3 before heading up Interstate 85 to do his set over the weekend here; same goes for California rock band Young the Giant. It’ll work the other way around as well: The Struts will perform in Charlotte first, then head south for a Sunday show in Atlanta.

So it’s conceivable that the two festivals could feed off of each other like that, at least a little bit, for years to come — if Lovin’ Life can do enough to impress the city in its first year to earn a second, which clearly is a goal of the stakeholders’.

“I’d like to have a franchise,” says Michael Smith, CEO of Charlotte Center City Partners. ”I’d love for this to be something that is renowned, and has a seasonal rhythm to it where people know that, Hey, in this month, you gotta make sure you’re in Charlotte; there’s gonna be a killer lineup, and it’s a great city.”

Durkin and Pedlow are confident that will pan out. They also know it won’t happen overnight.

“If we get 20 to 25,000 people out there and they all leave saying they had a fantastic time — it was safe, first of all, we delivered on the production side — that’s our measure of success,” says Durkin, as a bulldozer chips away at leveling off a dirt lot to improve sightlines for fans who’ll gather in front of where the main stage will be.

“Absolutely, this is something that we plan on doing for years to come, if the city will have us. It would humble us if they want us back,” he continues. “But this is a long-term investment. A multi-million-dollar investment. It’s not something that we take lightly, and it’s not something you’re gonna recoup in the first year. The plan is to be here for several years, but the (return on investment) comes after years. Several years.”

“It takes work,” Pedlow adds. “I wish there was a magic wand for that one, but there’s not.”

Durkin nods in agreement, is silent for a moment, then smiles and says: “A wand for the weather would be good, too.”