The first award nomination for a Westmoreland County-based band is a bright spot in a challenging year.

“Unforgiving Tree,” a song and video by the Derek Woods Band, is nominated in the Americana/Folk/Acoustic category of the Hollywood Music in Media Awards to be announced Jan. 27.

“We’re in a network of sites with industry contacts, and they just found our music,” said frontman Woods of Greensburg. “It’s pretty wild.

“(The nomination) means so much to us, to know they value what we’re working so hard to accomplish,” he said. “It makes us want to continue doing what we’re doing. It’s definitely a plus for us in 2020.”

The first single off the roots rock band’s 2019 album, “The Question,” the song “tells a story, sends a message and provides danceable back beats,” according to thejamwich.com.

“It’s a spin-off of the Shel Silverstein book (‘The Giving Tree’),” Woods said. “It’s a different take on that story,” about the relationship between a boy and a tree, in which the boy takes everything the tree has to give, until there’s nothing left but a stump for him to sit on as an old man.

Founded in 2009, the HMMA is “the first award organization to honor original music (Song and Score) in all visual media from around the globe including film, TV, video games, trailers, commercial advertisements, documentaries and special programs,” according to its website. “The HMMA nominations have historically been representative of the nominees of key awards shows that are announced months later.”

Woods and band members Joshua Carns, Chris Schaney, Joe Scheller and Chris Bellin were hoping to travel to the awards ceremony, but those plans are on hold while the organization decides whether there will be a live event or not, he said.

“We have to prerecord an acceptance speech anyway, in case we win,” he said.

The video was recorded on a cold day last November, Wood said.

“We initially had a tree in mind that was fitting for the storyline, but when we visited the location just days before the filming began, we quickly came to find that the tree had recently lost too many limbs and wouldn’t work as expected,” he said.

“I personally drove around scouting out different locations that might fit the setting, from farms to large fields with singular unique trees in them to wooded areas,” he said. “I finally found a perfect tree standing in a soybean field in Latrobe” on land owned by a friend.

The video was directed and filmed by Jamie Wright of Pittsburgh-based Division St. Films.

Still playing

Despite so many events being canceled due to the pandemic, “We’ve been very fortunate to still play some shows here and there,” Woods said. “We’re being careful and they’ve all been outdoors.”

That included a Sept. 17 date with The Allman Betts Band at the Starlight Drive-In in Butler.

The band will take part in the Global Home Music Fest, an online festival beginning Friday and running through Nov. 5 and featuring dance and musical acts in all genres from around the world.

They’ve also recorded a new full-length album for release next year, working with audio engineer Daniel Blake at The Schoolhouse, a recording studio in Armbrust, and with Los Angeles-based mastering engineer Gavin Lurssen, a Grammy Award-winner whose work includes “Raising Sand,” an album by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, and the soundtrack for the Coen Brothers film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

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