Playground magazine

Nine years ago, when I thought “Nashville,” I thought cowboy hats. Honky-tonks. Bleached blondes in rhinestones. You get the picture. Little did I know that I’d end up recording my first record in Nashville a year later, and living there the next almost seven years.

I realized that there was much more to the picture than the postcards would have you believe. Nashville is a micro-universe packed with some of the most experienced music folk of every possible ilk. I learned a lot.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was what not to do. In spite of the ever-increasing diversity in Nashville, I remained something of a black sheep, as I never tried to fit into the cookie-cutter mould of the pop country mainstream market. But these days, there are more and more black sheep in the flock, and against all odds, it’s changing the face of Music City for the better.

Here is my attempt to demystify what it popularly known as the “Nashville sound” – the good, the bad, and the alternative, and how that particular combination has made and continues to make Music City what it is.

Nashville is known for Country music, with a (very) capital “C.” Country music used to be just that -- music from people who came from the country. They sang with a twang because they talked that way. They wrote about what they knew. They played acoustic guitars instead of Telecasters because they couldn’t afford shoes for the whole family, much less electricity for an amplifier (see Loretta Lynn’s biography). There wasn’t any kind of angle or strategy about it. It was what it was. And it grew.

Once people in the cities realized they could make money off of this home-grown stuff, the game changed. They put the country singers on the road. They dressed them in custom suits. They put them on private jets. They stuck them on the radio and on TV, right next to Elvis. People came to listen. People paid to listen. And everybody wanted in.

In 1960, Time magazine reported that Nashville – formerly a good-sized Tennessee town with little to brag about -- was producing more music than Hollywood, and was only slightly behind New York. The times they were a-changin’.

In the era of the 60s and 70s, the nasal backwoods-sounding vocals were replaced by smoother pop sensibilities and gaggles of backing vocalists. String sections replaced lone fiddles. Electric guitar and pedal steel took the place of a simple acoustic or banjo with a little dobro sprinkled on top. And instead of simply telling a story, the songs took on the now-familiar structure of the pop radio hits of the day. A very small group of producers using an equally small group of musicians made a large number of records; as a result, a certain common element or “sound” became inevitable. The concept of the “Nashville sound” was born, and since the late 1950s, countless records have been churned out of Nashville’s recording studios with specific elements in common.

Fast forward fifty-odd years. Country music is big business, and like any business, it needs to keep its investors happy. There is R&D (research and development) involved. There are statistics and sales reports. Meantime the pop and rock giants have made television and the public image of the artist as important, if not more so, than the music itself. Country music has changed with the times, and the modern version is closer to pop than to anything you might have heard in the hills of the Carolinas or Kentucky a few generations ago.

If you’re wondering why this is a problem, think about it. The inherent idea behind Pop(ular) music does not clash with the idea of mass marketing. But the soul of music from the countryside – think land, sun, the simple life – is lost or at least heavily compromised when a hair and make-up department, tour buses and beer sponsorships are involved in the thought process that goes into making and then marketing the music. Hence pop country. And voilà, country is the ultimate mainstream music of white America.

Most music fans who consider themselves to be “real” music people or “serious listeners” consciously or unconsciously try to avoid the mainstream. They don’t like the idea of being spoon-fed. They don’t go in for anything that they consider to be pre-packaged stuff. (Or if they do, they’d never admit it in public.) But if that’s the case, why is this Frankenstein’s monster version of country music so successful? Is it just the magic of marketing, or is there value in the hybrid formula? Some argue that there is something to be learned from the machine. Others say we’re experiencing the death throes of the music as we knew it.

First of all, it’s important to recognize that there is a formula. And like any recipe, it can be prepared well or badly, and can be adjusted to taste.

When I lived in Nashville, I was told by the powers that be that the ideal length for a song is two-and-a-half minutes. According to (somebody’s) statistics, that’s the ideal listenable length for a radio single. Never mind that U2 or the Beatles or whoever else you can think of regularly broke that rule – we’re talking country radio, people. Rules is rules.

Intros that last longer that ten seconds should be avoided at all cost, or you’ll lose your audience. Repetition and catchy hooks are gold. Complicated chord structures or deep metaphors are not. “Your listening public is the women who are shopping in the bulk aisle at Wal-Mart at 8am – write for them” is what I was told at a song-writing seminar. Power to the lowest common denominator. Take a cliché or snappy saying, wrap it in some lap steel and telecaster riffs to make it sound “authentic,” and press the big red record button.

Subject is important. You want to talk about tractors, whiskey, moonshine, broken hearts, cheatin’, (skip the “g” in order to achieve the appropriate country twang), pickup trucks, beer, prison, and your mama – preferably all in the same song. You want your audience to identify with the storyline, and as you’re aiming for a theoretically huge mass of listeners you need to make the story as general and as easy-to-swallow as possible.

You are basically trying to come up with something that millions or billions of people will understand and like at first glance. Think the musical equivalent of white bread or vanilla ice cream; therefore, by default, this “something” cannot be too exotic or challenging. I personally prefer some decent chicken curry to white bread, but there’s a reason that you see white bread on every shelf in every grocery store in almost every country in the Western world. It’s plain. It goes with everything. It’s easy to digest. No surprises.

Following that thought pattern, what does white bread music contain that millions want or think they need? Why do they buy this stuff -- assuming they’re buying and not just ripping MP3s off of a friend’s computer? Is it just because they’ve heard the same song on the radio fifty times, and familiarity equals Pavlov’s dog I-like-it syndrome? Or does it go deeper than that?

In order to discuss what makes music appealing, Nashville-style or otherwise, we need to delve into meaning-of-life stuff for a minute.

Everyone wants to be understood. When life gives you lemons… it’s helpful if you can turn on the radio and think, “ok, someone else can relate.” Or when life is going splendidly, and you feel the need to celebrate, there’s nothing better to amp up the evening than a three-chord party song. Even those of us who are uber-independent (often irritatingly so, to our families or significant others) are hard-wired to want to belong to something, to know that we’re not alone in sorrow or in anger or in joy, even if it’s only for only a couple of verses and choruses. This is one of the great gifts that music gives us.

So it stands to reason that people who want to sell their music to a mass audience by definition need to make music that folks understand.

That doesn’t excuse lazy art or copycat song-writing. But before we write off the entire new generation of country or roots music artists, we need to stop and think about whether there might be guys (or girls) out there who do it well -- who make music that is well-crafted and also has something to say. This is the spark of originality that makes a song art instead of just a product to sell. Is there a way that we can learn from the machine without succumbing to it? What positive elements, if any, does it bring to the table?

There is music out there that challenges us, that pushes the envelope and strives for originality, but still adheres to what is considered to be a “popular” format. It’s interesting, the lyrics and arrangements might be saying something fresh, but it’s just familiar enough that it doesn’t sound like something from another planet. That’s where Nashville has a few positive points to offer.

The arrangement, production, the sounds of the instruments, and the craft of the song itself – that’s what we can learn from Nashville. Nowhere else in the world will you find more experts in the latter. The craft of the song itself is Nashville’s speciality. I venture to say this after having spent time in most of the major music capitals of the world, from LA to NY to London to Berlin. The danger is that it is possible to craft the song to death in an effort to achieve theoretical perfection. In the quest to write the next “great hit song,” a writer can grind the life out of an idea. Then it is no longer a thing of art, but a colourless copy of what is known to have “worked” in the past. However, there are many artists out there – most of whom you’ve never hears of -- who walk the line with elegance and a style all their own. They’ve learned the rules, and they break them beautifully.