In May 2015, I sat down in an empty pub in West London to interview Kate York. I had been eagerly following the US TV drama Nashville since the pilot in October 2012, and was excited to talk to the songwriter who had penned some of my favourite songs from the show (‘Stronger Than Me’, ‘Nothing In This World Can Ever Break My Heart Again’, ‘Believing’). What I didn’t anticipate, however, was hearing about a fascinating project Kate was working on while in London. Together with friend Sonya Jasinski, Kate was putting together a coffee table photobook of Music City’s finest – intimate, candid, mostly black and white shots of the musicians, songwriters, producers and industry folk that keep the cogs in Nashville turning. It sounded like a fabulous project, and when I heard that it had finally been given a release date, I was thrilled.
Nashville: Behind The Curtain will be available for purchase from May 3, carrying a $29.99 price tag. Featuring a foreword by Kacey Musgraves, an introduction by Kings of Leon’s Nathan Followill, and an afterword by Holly Williams, the landscape hardback is filled with over 160 pages of Nashville fairy dust. As I carefully turned each page, pouring over the glossy representations of singular, perfect snapshots in time – captured with artistic precision but shot with the familiarity and ease you might expect from Polaroids between friends – I was struck by how they took me back to the heart of the 13-year-old girl who fell in love with country music. I was not surrounded by music particularly growing up, and my interests lay solely in the pop music on the charts, but at 13 I discovered country music and my whole life changed. There was something powerful, heartfelt and authentic about country music that spoke to a girl from England’s middle class home counties. There was also an exoticism, that tapped into my need to fly away and live a life of magical moments with sparkling human beings.
So as I drank in the candid smiles, moments lost in thought, and written insights into the strange pull of Nashville, I was reminded of 13-year-old me, wide-eyed and dreaming of neon lights and creatives playing music into the early hours. When I finally visited Nashville two years ago, aged 21, it was everything I had hoped it would be and more, and ever since I have been pining to return. I have a well-documented tendency towards apathy, but as soon as I arrived, I knew instantly that Nashville was my favourite place on Earth. There’s definitely something in the air in that place, and this book has somehow been able to capture its highs and lows, its magic and glitz and hard-won successes, wrapped up in the quiet moments that make the town tick.
Stars of its pages include the storied likes of Kacey Musgraves, Little Big Town, Connie Britton, Hayden Panettiere, Lee Ann Womack, Jay Joyce, Brandy Clark, Hunter Hayes, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, T-Bone Burnett and Callie Khouri, Shane McAnally, Ashley Monroe, Brothers Osborne, Buddy and Julie Miller, Charlie Worsham, Maren Morris, and the songwriting trio known as the Love Junkies (Liz Rose, Lori McKenna, Hillary Lindsey), among many more. It truly seems to represent a huge cross-section of people in Nashville, with the focus primarily on country musicians and songwriters, but by no means limited to.
The majority of those pictured also provided anything from a couple of lines to a couple of paragraphs on their favourite Nashville memories, in addition to expressions of their love for the city and its music industry. There are too many quotable lines for me to mention, but perhaps most fitting (at least for me, at this point in time for country music), is Barry Dean’s musing on a songwriter’s true dream. “I love to hear a song I had something to do with on the radio. It’s very moving. Still, I think there’s something that drives me as a writer, and others I’ve talked to have said they agree: We want to write the songs people sing along to, and sing to themselves when they’re alone – the ones they hold on to.” It is fitting not only because it references those in-between, intimate moments – behind the scenes in their natural environment – that we see in these pictures, but because it sums up the pure and honest heart that still beats somewhere under Music Row’s business dollars. That after all the hits and the flashy cars and the celebrity limelight is gone, all anybody really wants is to make a great song that touches people.
This book touched me, and reminded me of the magic that still fills my heart every time I think of that place.
Originally posted here.
