Category: MISC

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers Go Heavy On The Hits In Nashville

Four songs into his set Tuesday night at Bridgestone Arena, Tom Petty announced that the band’s next song had not been played live in more than a decade.

And with that, Petty and the Heartbreakers kicked into “You Got Lucky,” an ominous masterpiece of a song that elicited a chorus of “hell yeah”s when the minor chords of Benmont Tench’s synthesizer blasted through the speakers.

It was a testament to Petty’s seemingly bottomless repertoire of hits that he could dust off a song like that willy-nilly and still have it be an anthemic arena sing-a-long.

With the exception of the opening number, “Rockin’ Around (With You)” — the first song on the first Heartbreakers record — and a few other cuts, Tuesday night’s show was heavy on the hits, despite the tour being billed as a celebration of that album’s 40th anniversary.

It was also one of the more raucous and engaged crowds this writer has ever seen at Bridgestone. When Petty played Bonnaroo back in 2013, his set was borderline lethargic, and perhaps that was intentional, given the stoner vibe of the festival. But Tuesday night’s show stood in defiant counterpoint to that. And the crowd, which spanned several generations, responded in kind.

Around the front of the stage, in the not-so-cheap seats, one could find a who’s who of Nashville-based musicians, including Robyn Hitchcock and Wilco’s Pat Sansone. Petty even remarked at one point that if you’re not a guitar player in Nashville, you’re a songwriter. But for the most part, the 66-year-old kept the stage banter to a relative minimum, calling the Nashville crowd “unbelievable” and saying “we can hear every word you’re singing.”

Indeed, it seemed at times that the sold-out crowd knew every word to every song. And it was remarkable to consider just how well these songs have aged through the years. So many of these classic Petty cuts seem to exist in the ether, and the very idea of a world without his music is hard to fathom.

Petty’s voice is raspier than it was in his heyday, but it still gets the job done. And the Heartbreakers, led by guitarist Mike Campbell, who these days resembles a dread-locked Captain Jack Sparrow, never break stride. It’s easy to see why Rick Rubin has long called them the best rock and roll band in the world.

When Petty and the Heartbreakers released their debut back in ’76, some critics dismissed them as a “nostalgic” act. How wrong they were. The final track of that debut album, and the final song of the night, “American Girl,” still crackles with thunder, sounding as fresh and vital as the day it was released.

With A Little Help From Jason Isbell, Drive-By Truckers Deliver Scorching Set At The Ryman

With A Little Help From Jason Isbell, Drive-By Truckers Deliver Scorching Set At The Ryman « American Songwriter

At Nashville Gig, Outlaw Folkie Steve Earle Honors Late Mentor Guy Clark with ‘Goodbye Michelangelo’

At Nashville Gig, Outlaw Folkie Steve Earle Honors Late Mentor Guy Clark with ‘Goodbye Michelangelo’ « American Songwriter

Memphis

It is said that some art lovers who visit Florence, Italy experience Stendhal syndrome, a psychosomatic condition whereby one becomes so overwhelmed in the presence of famous art that they get physically ill. The phenomena is named after the French writer Stendhal, who, upon visiting Florence for the first time in the early 19th century, described being “in a sort of ecstasy … close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … life was drained from me … and I walked with the fear of falling.”

Perhaps more than a few visitors to Graceland and Sun Studios have felt this. And though we didn’t exactly faint when walking by the Jungle Room and reflecting on the delights of a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich, it’s hard not to be overtaken by Memphis, and all it has to offer music fans.

Simply put, we had a blast hanging out in the Bluff City while researching this issue. Our trip included a visit to Al Green’s church, the Full Gospel Tabernacle, where we took in an inspiring session of largely improvised gospel (though Rev. Green was not in attendance that Sunday) before moving on to Presley’s estate just down the road.

We got a private tour of Ardent Studios, the place where Alex Chilton’s band Big Star cut all three of its records. We hit Goner Records and Shangri-La Records, two must-see places for any serious record collector. Later, a trip to Sun Records served as a good reminder of the genius of Sam Phillips and just how visionary (and crazy) this man was. As the writer Peter Guralnick told American Songwriter last year, “Sam envisioned [early rock and roll] long before it existed — before it had a name or expression.” If Memphis only had Sun Records to claim, that alone would be enough.

Downtown nightspots like Earnestine & Hazel’s, a former brothel that is purportedly haunted and offers live jazz and blues, did not disappoint. And neither did Raiford’s, a raucous, family-owned late-night disco that first opened its doors nearly 40 years ago and is still going strong.

*****

Tennessee residents are lucky to have two world-class music cities within its borders. No other state can make such a boast. But Memphis is very much its own entity, musically speaking, and shares little cross-pollination with its more countrified cousin Nashville.

So much of Memphis’s musical history draws from the blues tradition of the Mississippi Delta. And many a Memphis native will tell you that, culturally, the city is as much a part of Mississippi as it is Tennessee. But as Luther Dickinson, guitarist for the North Mississippi All-Stars and a solo artist in his own right, points out, what constitutes Memphis music is not bound by geographical lines. And it’s not so much the Memphis sound (as that is a wide pretty wide cosmos unto itself) as it is “the Memphis attitude … it is underground, outsider music that transcends where it comes from.”

The body of work put by Stax records during its heyday in the ’60s and ’70s certainly transcends region. This issue’s cover story looks at the Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, a serendipitous pairing that yielded such iconic soul classics as “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” to name a few.

Hayes passed away in 2008 but Porter continues to work on behalf of Memphis’ musical legacy. He now serves as the president of the Consortium MMT, a non-profit organization that is working to create and develop a sustainable music industry in the city. He has also been in involved with the Stax Music Academy, an after-school music program that offers music education and mentoring for at-risk Memphis youth. Be sure to check out our story on the academy later in this issue.

We also explore Memphis’s sometimes-ignored indie-rock scene, with a particular focus on the long-running underground punk extravaganza GonerFest and the music of its patron saint, the late Jay Reatard, whose madcap sound and persona functioned as a refreshing juxtaposition to the usual Memphis fare. And we talk to confessional folk songwriter Julien Baker, who at just 20-years-old is making a name for herself with a debut album whose maturity belies her young age.

Reason For Believing

April is the cruelest month, and with it came the death of Merle Haggard, widely regarded as one of the greatest singers and songwriters in country music history.

The obits called him the “patriarch of outlaw country” and the man who “defined the outlaw aesthetic.” If any country musician could lay claim to the “outlaw” designation, it was Merle, who went to San Quentin prison at age 20 for robbery and an attempted jail escape.

Despite the “outlaw” tag, Haggard stood apart from trends and movements. He was fiercely independent and exceedingly complex as a man and artist. (“There are about 1,700 ways to take “Okie From Muskogee,” he once said.) His work drew as much from blues, jazz and Western swing as it did from the country music of the time. Along with Buck Owens, he is credited with creating the “Bakersfield Sound,” which is often seen as a reaction to the slicker sounds coming out of Nashville in the mid- to late-’50s. I think Haggard was just making the music he wanted to make at the time, and disinterested in the goings-on of Music City. The “Bakersfield Sound” was not a reactionary aesthetic, as far as I can tell.

The popular storyline concerning cover subject Sturgill Simpson, as well as other luminaries like Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell, is that they represent the “New Outlaws,” a group of subversives hell-bent on upending the machinery of Music Row and restoring “authentic” country music to its rightful place on the throne. It is a narrative that has been played out ad nauseam in the public prints.

From my vantage, all three of these artists are songwriters first and foremost, writing songs and recording music to the best of their ability. Their affiliation with country is largely by virtue of having been raised in the South. No artist worth his salt wants to be confined to a movement, or compared to something that came before.

So much of American journalism cribs from other journalism. The tired old storylines seem to get recycled over and over again, and this is especially true in music journalism. As listeners and fans, we are forced submit to these manufactured narratives that are promulgated by publicists and the media to sell records. “Daddy worked on a railroad.” “I got drunk and thrown in jail.” “I got kidnapped by aliens and was force-fed LSD, please listen to my record.”
It all gets a bit old. Why not just focus on the music, and maintain some air of mystery where the biographies are concerned.

In our cover story, Simpson tells writer Andrew Leahey he didn’t think he had a career when he made his last album, Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, believing at the time that it was the last record he would get to make. Why not go for broke? he thought. His new album, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth, is equally bold, drawing on a wide kaleidoscope of American musical influences. Simpson self-produced the album and recorded it in five days. He went into the studio to lay down some demos but found the groove and called it a wrap.

Writing good songs is not easy. You have to go wherever you can, using the materials at hand. Merle told American Songwriter in 2010 that he spent his professional life chasing the muse. “That’s what keeps me alive,” he said, “that hope that I’ll write the song that’ll knock me out and that will be better than ‘Working Man Blues,’ and better than ‘Mama Tried.’ That’s my reason for believing.” It seems Merle was in competition only with himself.

Another artist featured in these pages who has forged his own path is Will Oldham, a former actor turned recording artist who makes albums under the moniker of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. His latest offering features lyrics that were taken from the fortunes of fortune cookies he had collected over decades. Talk about a novel approach.

Finally, we are retiring our long-running Deathbed contest this issue, and replacing it with “The High Five” (presented by Martin Guitar), which will feature a rotating cast of topics, the first one being “The Five Songs I Wish I’d Written.” We look forward to reading your entries.

When It Comes To Neil Young, Tomorrow Never Knows

You can always count on a left turn or two at a Neil Young show. Midway through his set in Nashville Thursday night, old Shakey threw in a monkey wrench during the middle of “Okie From Muskogee,” a tune he performed in tribute to the late Merle Haggard, a man he called a great poet and great American. When the chorus of the song kicked in, the band’s drummer shifted gears and proceeded to lay down a drum beat that sounded a lot like The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” John Lennon’s hypnotic paean to LSD. It was a hilarious moment, and one that served to illuminate the song’s native brilliance. “Okie,” released by Haggard in 1969 with flower power already wilting, is a tune of perpetual ironies, and one that can be listened to “1,700 different ways,” as Haggard once said.

Young also tweaked a few lyrics for good measure, including the line “We don’t take our trips on LSD,” subbing “STP” in for the classic hallucinogen, a nod to his affinity for electric-biodiesel cars. [Watch a fan-shot video of the performance below.]

The 70-year-old rock icon had come to Nashville as part of his Rebel Content tour, accompanied by his new backing band Promise Of The Real, a group of young gunners spearheaded by guitarists Lukas and Micah Nelson (sons of Willie) who backed Young on his latest studio album, The Monsanto Years. Young opened the set solo, with his voice in fine fettle, alternating on acoustic guitar, piano, and pump organ, proffering old standards like “After The Gold Rush,” “Heart Of Gold,” and “Long May You Run.” Promise of The Real then joined him for a handful of acoustic numbers — “Unknown Legend and “One Of These Days” among them — with Neil leading the charge on his 1941 Martin D-28, a guitar that was once owned by Hank Williams. “This is not a museum piece,” he told the crowd.

Nashville clearly holds special meaning for Young, who has done his share of recording in Music City through the years, with tracks from seminal albums Harvest and Comes A Time having been cut here. Shaky confessed that things looked a bit different this time around in Music City, as this marked his maiden show at Ascend Amphitheater.

“When did you build this place?” he quipped at one point, later asking, “What’s going on in the Pinnacle?”, a reference to the towering glass castle that commands the skyline behind the stage. There was also the occasional hell-scream of sirens from the street to contend with. “It’s all part of it,” Young said. “I like all sounds. It’s like animals, if you actually talk to them they look at you.”

The decibel level picked up when Neil slung on “Old Black,” his Gibson Les Paul, and launched into “Down By The River,” complete with its signature guitar wig-out. Promise Of The Real sizzled as a backing band all night, and it’s unlikely there were many in the crowd who lamented the absence of Crazy Horse.

Late into the set Neil & co. broke out “Powderfinger,” a Southern Gothic number about riverboat gun violence that mourns the death of a gal named Emmylou. It’s well known that he wrote “Powderfinger” for Lynyrd Skynyrd to record — Ronnie Van Zandt was killed in that famous plane crash before the band could cut it — after they facetiously called for his excommunication from all things Dixie in “Sweet Home Alabama,” a song that Neil has always claimed to love. One song Young no longer loves is the very one that spawned the Skynyrd tune, his own “Alabama,” which he hasn’t performed live since the late ’70s. “I don’t like my words [on “Alabama”] when I listen to it today,” he wrote in his autobiography Waging Heavy Peace. “They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, easy to misconstrue.”

The delights of “Powderfinger” were not easily misconstrued, notwithstanding the song’s historical ironies. It was one of the night’s highlights, to be sure, and the perfect soundtrack for a spring evening spent along the Cumberland River.

Port of Call

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”

 – Pat Conroy, The Prince Of Tides

Lucinda Williams is haunted by the South. So many of her great songs, it seems, wrestle with the ghosts of her Southern heritage. Past lovers and past lives are forever tied to place, and in her case it’s often the old Civil War towns of Mississippi and Louisiana.

On “Jackson,” the final song off of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, her beloved 1998 album, the narrator anticipates passing through several towns on an unspecified road-trip, and wonders what feelings those places will trigger about a certain loved one. “All the way to Jackson/ I don’t think I’ll miss you much/ All the way to Jackson/ I don’t think I’ll miss you much.”

The song unfolds over a few chords of finger-picked acoustic guitar, accompanied by a voice that Emmylou Harris once testified could “melt the chrome off a trailer hitch.” If the narrator is not missing this person, she doesn’t sound like it. The emotional history of their relationship is wedded to these towns (Jackson, Lafayette, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge), and it will forever be so.

Williams’ new album, The Ghosts Of Highway 20, returns to much of the same swampy terrain she traversed on Car Wheels, and the albums feel like bookends in a way, though the latter offers little in the way of resolution (the death of her mother and father – and all the questions those events raise –  are explored in two different songs). In our cover story, the daughter of the poet Miller Williams talks at length about her upbringing, a rough-and-tumble ordeal not without its transcendent moments, including a trip to the homestead of Flannery O’Conner (her dad’s idol), and a chance meeting at age six with bluesman Blind Pearly Brown, a big-bang moment that offered young Lucinda a privileged glimpse into a mysterious and hypnotic otherworld. Even in her childhood, it seems the literary and low-down were never far apart.

Of course, family and place are not exclusive to Southerners as sources of artistic inspiration. The poignant new album from Boston native Aoife O’Donovan, In The Magic Hour, was inspired by the recent death of her grandfather, an Irishman, and the childhood summers she spent with him along the Emerald Isle. The record is in part an elegy for lost youth, and features a rendition of “Donal Og” (originally an eighth-century Irish poem and a favorite of Ted Hughes no less), a tune O’Donovan’s musician parents sang to her as a child. The song’s outro even includes a clip of her grandfather singing the words to the Irish traditional “The West’s Awake.” It’s a stirring moment indeed.

*****

2016 has already seen the exit of a number of artists that helped shape the DNA of pop music over the last half-century. Patterson Hood, one of the principal singers and songwriters of Drive-By Truckers, the celebrated Southern rock band, pays tribute to one of the departed, David Bowie, in the back pages of this issue. Hood argues that Bowie’s prowess as a songwriter is often overlooked, simply because of his superlatives in so many other areas.

Finally, we jet down to the Florida panhandle for the 30A Songwriters Festival. Now in its seventh year, the three-day event has established itself as one of the pre-eminent songwriting festivals in the country. This year’s spectacle boasted marquee acts like Jackson Browne, Grace Potter and Shovels & Rope, but it was in in the boutique restaurants and beachside bars that dot this scenic stretch of the Gulf Coast where the real action took place. Artists like Charlie Mars, Robert Ellis and Elise Davis held us rapt with just their voice and guitar. The weekend also offered young-gun artists the chance to rub shoulders with their heroes in the bars and cafes, and in impromptu guitar pulls that went down after-hours in fabulously chic hotels. It was a great event, all around, and one songwriters and music lovers should not miss next year.

A Songwriter’s Songwriter

Tom T. Hall is not a household name. Even in haunts where the country jukebox constantly spins, his songs are not on heavy rotation.

This is not to his discredit. Hall had chart success in his heyday, but he’s a songwriter’s songwriter, first and foremost, and his influence looms large in the world of any country songwriter versed in the canon. Or it should anyway.

As Peter Cooper writes in our cover story, Tom T. was one of a handful of writers in the ’60s who “elevated and altered the language and narrative form of country music, and blazed a path down which Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and John Prine would later meander.”

The small-town Kentucky boy showed up in Nashville as a writer for hire, attempting to mimic the radio trends of the time, as his publisher would have it. Hall found his own voice serendipitously with a little help from his wife, continued to believe in the merit of that voice, and never looked back.

I first discovered Hall via a tribute album in the late ’90s that featured versions of his tunes by artists like Ron Sexsmith, Calexico, and Iris Dement. The songwriting prowess wowed. Years later, I heard Drive-By Truckers cover “Mama Bake A Pie (Daddy Kill A Chicken),” a song about a disabled war veteran, and was reminded of his wordsmithing brilliance. “Since I won’t be walking I suppose I’ll save some money buying shoes,” the paraplegic narrator deadpans. This is vintage Hall lyricism — walking the razor’s edge between despair and humor like some trailer-park version of Oscar Wilde.

Tens of thousands of songwriters have called Nashville home in the last half-century. There have been too many good ones to count, but only a handful who can truly be called great, who have busted open new worlds and changed the evolutionary arc of the art-form. For writers like Tom T., it’s no so much three chords and the truth as it is three chords and the all the new truths that he will discover.

This year’s Legends issue, often referred to within the office as the annual O.W.D. (“old white dude”) edition, salutes a group of writers and musicians — most of them not super well-known — that have created a body of work that continues to inspire and influence.

The late Blaze Foley, an Austin-based songwriter and professional hell-raiser, is one of these unsung heroes. Foley is perhaps best known as the writer of “If I Could Only Fly,” a tune covered by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Lucinda Williams immortalized Blaze in the song “Drunken Angel” off her Car Wheels album. For our story, James Williamson traveled to Georgia and New Orleans and tracked down some of Blaze’s old acquaintances, piecing together a nomadic and tragic life that was punctuated with brief periods of songwriting brilliance. A number of young songwriters in Nashville know Blaze’s small catalog chapter and verse. Newcomer Aaron Lee Tasjan, whose album In The Blazes made our Top 50 of 2105 List, pays tribute to him on on the song “Lucinda’s room,” for instance.

Elsewhere, we check in with Spooner Oldham, the organist from The Swampers in Muscle Shoals and one of the all-time great session men in the history of rock and roll. Spooner, ever content to be the sideman, also released a solo album in the early ‘70s that was reissued earlier this year. Here, he looks back on his life as a session man.

We also catch up with Tony Rice, a master flat picker who is cited by many a bluegrass guitarist as their reason for picking up the instrument. My first introduction to Tony came in the form of The Pizza Tapes, the bootlegged recording of an impromptu jam session between Rice, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman in the early ‘90s that featured a number of traditional folk numbers. It is worth checking out. Also, Rand Bishop pays tribute to fellow Oregon native Mickey Newbury, who decided to give songwriting a shot after a tenure in the Navy. Like Tom T., Newbury is a true master craftsmen, and though he never attained mega-stardom, his songs continue to amaze today.

Lucero’s Never-Ending Tour

I caught my first Lucero show in 2006. The band played Nanci Raygun, a storied hardcore punk club in Richmond, Virginia that has since closed its doors. The show appropriately veered more toward punk than country in sound and spirit that night, and found frontman Ben Nicholsdonning his best Paul Westerberg impression. The band had released seven albums by that point since forming in ‘98 and had amassed a sizeable following in Richmond. The show felt like a good hang among friends, almost to the point that it resembled a house show. Back then, in Richmond, you could still buy PBR in a can for a dollar in the Fan district. Those were the days indeed.

Lucero launched its tour for eleventh studio album All A Man Should Do in Nashville last month. It’s a record that muzzles some of the band’s raucous tendencies and finds Nichols mining more introspective terrain as a songwriter, but without compromising that beloved balls-to-the-wall spirit. Nichols has said this is the record he wanted to make in 1989 – what is it about that year? — when he was 15 years old, but it took “25 years of mistakes” to actually get it done.

The band recorded the new record in Memphis at the famed Ardent Studios, where Memphis legends Big Star recorded all three of their albums in the early ’70s. Lucero even covers Big Star’s “I’m In Love With A Girl” – the first cover song they’ve ever committed to an album – and it features Big Star drummer Jody Stephens singing back-up. It’s a fitting tribute to a band that still reigns supreme as the spiritual godfathers of independent music in the River City. All A Man Should Do is part three of a trilogy of albums, according to the band, that began with 1372 Overton Park, the first record that featured a horn section and marked a turning point sonically.

“This is a Memphis record in the greatest sense and a perfect finish to the three-part love letter to a city that brought us up and made us what we are today,” guitarist Brian Venable said.

Lucero has never tried to reinvent the wheel, and the new album is no exception. Like the novels of Jane Austen, the songs that make up the Lucero catalog are concerned with variations on a few themes, and in their case, the themes are women, work and whiskey. (Their 2012 album was titledWomen & Work, after all, a term that Nichols confessed to being very Bukowski in its nomenclature.)

These themes still abound on All A Man Should Do, only this time they are looked at from the vantage point of one too many Sunday mornings that have come crashing down. The songs are about making peace with the life you’ve chosen, knowing full well that you can’t turn back. And their path is the long and winding road of a touring rock band, and its attendant occupational hazards, namely drinking and the difficulty of maintaining any semblance of a stable romantic relationship. Watching the show in Nashville and hearing the words to the new songs I was reminded of the Drive-By Truckers lyric, “Rock and roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies.”

The band is performing two sets on this tour, one acoustic and one electric, with an intermission in between and no opener, so be sure to get there on time. Much of the first set involves tracks from the new album, along with fan favorite “Texas and Tennessee,” a song off their 2013 EP of the same name that deals with a long-distance love affair but also unites the musical histories of the Volunteer and Lonestar states. Whatever regret about the night life is evinced in the songs of the opening set is non-existent in the second. This is the hard rocking portion of the show and features songs like “On My Way Downtown,” “Nights Like These,” and “Women and Work,” a high-octane number that boasts the lyric: “A honky tonk and a jack knife/ A tomahawk and an ex-wife/ Come on kid let’s drink ‘em down/ Kid don’t let it get you down.” It’s a call the crowd took to heart, as if it needed any encouraging.

When you consider how many shows Lucero has played in its time, and it’s not uncommon for the band to play 250 shows a year, you might forgive them if they seem a bit enervated from a decade and a half on the road. But amazingly, the old feral fire is still there, as much as it was when I first caught their live act in 2006. And it’s mind-blowing to consider that the original line-up is still intact. Of what other band of their longevity can that be said?

The crowd at Cannery Ballroom in Nashville was characteristically a sea of plaid-flannel, and heavily male. In fact, it would take seeing 1,000 Morrissey shows to match the level of testosterone present that night. “I dare anyone to try and not drink whiskey at a Lucero show,” my friend Tom said early into the second set. One look around the room and you saw he was right.

Taylor Swift Conquers Nashville With A Little Help from Mick Jagger

If we are known by the company we keep, then Taylor Swift is doing all right. The pop superstar summoned one of rock and roll’s all-time greats to the stage Saturday night in Nashville in the form of Mick Jagger, who performed the Stones’ classic “Satisfaction” with her in front of the sold-out crowd of 15,000 at Bridgestone Arena.

It was a move that surprised everyone in the crowd, and served as a reminder of the colossal power she commands as a broker in the industry.

Did she fly Jagger in from London for one song? Was he hanging out in Nashville for something else? Jagger played LP Field with the Stones this past summer, and it marked the first time the Glimmer Twin had visited Music City in a long time. So Nashville is by no means a regular haunt for the rock icon.

Swift’s 18-song show, her second of a two-night stand in Nashville and heavy on tracks from 1989, proved to be a master class in showmanship and arena production, and Jagger’s appearance was just lagniappe — a WTF? moment that enhanced but didn’t define the night. Swift opened with “Welcome To New York,” sporting Wayfarers and a glitter warm-up jacket, backed by a dozen or so male dancers who on the opening number called to mind Biff’s futuristic squad from Back To The Future II. The jumbo-tron flashed with black and white images all night, in an effort to evoke the classic New York of Gatsby. Manhattan may be wildly overpriced and gentrified these days, with a Starbucks on every corner, but Swift’s vision of the city still contains “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” as Fitzgerald wrote, and it remains a dreamscape for reinvention, where you take your “broken hearts and put them in a drawer.”

As Swift transitioned to the second song, she shed the warm-up jacket like Larry Bird used to after the first round of the 3-point contest, revealing a black halter-top as she tore into fan favorite “New Romantics,” a bonus track from 1989. It was one of many outfit changes of the night.

Like any masterful politician, Swift knows how to play to the base— and the red-meat wing of the party is still young teenage girls. The high pitched shriek of the crowd when she first strode on stage affirmed that. One of Swift’s greatest talents is her ability to make the fans feel they are as much a part of the show — and her life — as anyone else. At one point she remarked that she recognized several in the crowd from their Instagram pics. (Before the show, fans even approached her dad for a photo op as he was milling about, for that one-degree of separation experience.)

Saturday’s show was punctuated with testimonials from her “squad” (Girls creator Lena Dunham, Victoria’s Secret models Karlie Kloss and Lily Aldridge, Selena Gomez et al.) about what it’s like to hang with Taylor. It’s not so much a lifestyle brand she’s selling a la Martha Stewart as it is the dream of a better, more glamorous existence. It’s the promise of Thunder Road, only this time Thunder Road leads to Xanadu and is populated with beautiful women, talented writers, pastries and cats with funny names. And no matter what your take is on the songs, and we at American Songwriter are bigs fans of her songwriting, naming 1989 one of the best albums of 2014, you can’t help but be inspired by the Horatio Alger ambition on display here, no matter what form your own dream takes.

When Swift delivered a solo acoustic take of “Fifteen” from Fearless, she dedicated it to Abigail, her best friend from high school, and gave a shout-out to Hendersonville High School, a moment that connected the dots between small-town Tennessee girl and world superstar. Watching her show, it’s easy to forget Swift was even associated with country music. And if any of Nashville’s country music stars had joined her onstage Saturday night it would have been, well, a let-down. At another point Swift delivered a monologue about staying true to yourself and shaking off the haters, in her case the tabloid gossip that has dogged her dating life, and she became visibly emotional. “If anyone tells you you are uncool, they’re wrong,” she said.

Tickets for the event were not cheap. As of show time, some seats on the floor were listed on Stubhub for as much as $2,000. There were entire families in tow Saturday night and it was clear that not all of these dads were dentists with disposable incomes. But for so many of their kids, it must have been the highlight of their year. “Every time I get to hang out with you is the happiest I am,” she said near the end of the show, and no doubt many in the crowd returned the sentiment.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

I wrote this poem about the Voyager 1 exhibit at Seed Space, an installation art gallery in Nashville.

It was 1977.
We needed a dream
to rise up
and stoke “our capacity for wonder,”
as Fitzgerald would say.
Elvis was dead,
New York City was dark,
and there were Saturday night fevers
that just wouldn’t break.

So we fired you up,
cut the apron strings
and let you fly.
Over Jupiter and Saturn,
past pitiful old Pluto even.

But it gets lonely living “out there”
and thinking “out there.”
Just ask Icarus.
He left Earth and got burned by the sun.

But now
a little purple light
in a dark room in Nashville
that moves in shades
of red and blue and green
let’s us know
our old friend,
the robot,
is still out there,
still moving and shaking,
still talking back
to anyone
who will listen.

And since our friend left,
Carl Sagan has died,
and the pale blue dot we call home is burning.
And now Jimmy Carter has cancer.
But his Georgia farm boy voice
is with you, Voyager
and will be for a billion years.
And so is the cry of that baby
and the sounds of Bach and Beethoven,
of Blind Willie Johnson and “Johnny B. Goode.”

I hope someone finds you
and your record collection
before your race is run.

But they might not.
Sometimes love letters get lost in the mail.

But this little purple light
let’s us know
for now
that you were here
and there
and so were we.

In Due Time

American Songwriter Editor’s Note, September/October 2015

Jason Isbell turned heads in the music industry when his album Something More Than Free catapulted to the top of the Billboard country charts in June. When the news broke, left of center singer-songwriter Todd Snider – who served as the officiant of Isbell’s wedding ceremony – took to Facebook and declared “the war was over” and that Jason Isbell “saved country music.” No one could continue to complain any more, he said, that independent artists couldn’t compete with their radio-friendly cousins on a commercial level. “That’s the thing Nashville wouldn’t let everybody do,” Snider wrote. “Well, somebody did it and nobody stopped him. Without changing his music, and without changing his clothing, Jason Isbell did it.”

The battle between Americana and Wal-Mart radio country has been raging ever since the rise of alt-country in the mid-’90s, playing out like a micro-level NPR versus Fox News culture war. They represent two different aesthetics and serve two different markets. But within the last year, traditionally-minded country artists (Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley Monroe) have begun making serious waves within the established Nashville machine.

Much of this likely has to do with the backlash against “bro-country” as the reigning style of country radio. Jay Rosen of New York Magazine coined the term “bro-country” in 2013 to describe the Florida Georgia Line song “Cruise.” Since then, this subgenre of country music devoted to tailgates, beer, and scantily-clad girls has become the favorite punching bag of country music preservationists. (In many ways, these tirades have grown more tiresome than “bro-country” itself.) And songwriters on Music Row seem who can’t operate in the bro vein have experienced a crisis of faith with respect to their craft.

But bro-country has sold, and country music in Nashville has always been a business first. Chet Atkins used to joke that the “Nashville sound,” a slicker, pop-friendly production style that developed in the late ’50s and replaced the more rough-and-ready honky-tonk, was the sound of money jingling in his pocket.

*****
Our cover artist Chris Stapleton is the perfect example of a Music Row artist who has found critical and commercial success while remaining faithful to his artistic vision. He came to Nashville with quite literally just a dream and is now regarded as one of the best writers and singers in town. Stapleton got signed to a publishing deal shortly after showing up in Music City and then started a bluegrass group called The SteelDrivers that still continues without him to this day. After leaving The SteelDrivers, he started the Jompson Brothers, a rowdy Southern rock outfit in the vein of ZZ Top.

Stapleton once told me that he doesn’t like to mix genres when he’s writing. If it’s bluegrass, he keeps it bluegrass. If it’s Southern rock, Southern rock. His new album Traveller is old-school country, but without sounding self-consciously retro, and peaked at No. 2 on the country Billboard charts. It’s a veritable banger, and he’s even earned shout-outs from Justin Timberlake. It’s just amazing that it took so long for such a singular talent to finally get his due as a solo artist in his own right.

Another ascendant songwriter featured in these pages is John Moreland, whose latest album High On Tulsa Heat has generated a steady amount of buzz among Nashville’s songwriting community. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard other Music City songwriters rave about this Oklahoma rambler, and this is a town that often succumbs to a kind of “I’ve heard it all before” weltschmerz. One songwriting friend, who caught his show earlier this summer at the 5 Spot in East Nashville, said it was the first time in a long time he can remember hearing an artist who kept him stock-still, rapt in awe, for the entirety of the show. With artists like Moreland and Stapleton in our midst, the future definitely looks good.

Goin’ Up Country: Wildwood Revival Delivers The Goods in Georgia

Please pick up your trash, this is not Bonnaroo.”

Those words greeted us on a sign that marked the entrance to the Wildwood Revival campgrounds this past weekend, moments after a volunteer warned us a rattlesnake had been spotted near one of the patron’s tents.  “They bush-hogged it the other day and it stirred some stuff up, so keep an eye out, boys,” he told us.

There was no chance of anyone mistaking Wildwood for Bonnaroo. Now in its third year, this finely curated music and culture festival is the epitome of a laid-back Southern hang.

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Wildwood is held on 30 acres of rolling farm country in northeast Georgia, about a twenty-minute drive from Athens. An 1850s antebellum mansion sits prominently at the front of the property. This year’s event was capped at 500 entrants and at times gave off the air of an over-sized Southern wedding. It was a far cry from the bacchanalia that is Bonnaroo — no toplessness here, no candy-flippers frolicking in mushroom fountains, no appeals to the lunatic fringe.

The two-day event featured 15 musical acts and leaned heavily on rootsy singer-songwriter fare (Joe Fletcher, Lindi Ortega, Kelsey Waldon among them), with some more rocking ensembles (Water Liars, Blackfoot Gypsies, American Aquarium) thrown in for good measure.

In addition to the music, all of which took place from a stage nestled at the front of an open-air barn, the weekend offered a wide spectrum of life’s finer things: farm-to-table cuisine, craft beer, a pop-up vintage clothing store, Civil War-era tintype photographic portrait sessions for patrons, wiffle ball, an early morning yoga session, and more.

So it was as much an all-around chill-out as it was a music event. Once the province of neo-hippies and jam bands, the music festival as we know it is a constantly evolving beast, offering a little something for everybody, if they know where to look. Some festivals are run so well it’s easy to get spoiled as a music fan. In the age of the Internet and human isolation, these type of affairs also make for great social events, giving patrons to chance to kick back and make new friends with kindred spirits.

We arrived on grounds late Saturday afternoon to find Joe Fletcher and the Wrong Reasons engaged in a rowdy set amid some Deep South August humidity. (My photographer marked time that day by the arc of the sweat stain on my friend Will’s T-shirt.) Fletcher, who cut his teeth in the Providence, Rhode Island music scene but moved to Nashville years ago, led the crowd in a sweaty sing-along of “Mabel Gray,” an original tune by Brown Bird, the solo project of David Lamb, a Providence musician and friend of Fletcher’s who passed away from leukemia in 2014. Fletcher’s band, which featured Texas singer-songwriter Brian Wright on lead guitar, closed the set with a rootsy, down-home version of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.”

Another highlight on Saturday came from Water Liars, a three-piece from Oxford, Mississippi who takes its name from a short story by Barry Hannah, the other great writer who made his home in Oxford. They delivered their brand of Crazy-Horse styled Southern rock as the drummer took sips of beer from a sports water bottle between songs.

Canadian songstress Lindi Ortega, who served up a sea of heartbreak ballads along with a cover of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” was the last performer to take the stage. Her set was followed by the Keep On Movin’ dance party, a DJ set of national renown that goes down every Monday at East Nashville’s 5 Spot. Their playlist, heavy on the Motown, made for the perfect ending to a great day of music.