On a chilly evening in early December, the East Nashville skyline was aglow in a bright, periwinkle haze. Not the haze that neighborhood troubadour Todd Snider sang about on one of his many tributes to his side of the Cumberland River, the kind that emanates from a tightly rolled joint smoked next to the local liquor store. On this night, the light came via a massive, multi-story rig from the set of ABC’s Nashville, filming an upcoming episode here, in the “hip” part of town. It was the sort of blue glow that’s usually reserved for the deep-sea section of aquariums, where kids press their noses against the glass to get a better look at the sharks, leaving snot trails in their wake.
It’s appropriate, anyway — lately, East Nashville, and its music scene in particular, has felt more and more like a fishbowl. For the past few years, as Americana has morphed into the new rock & roll and outlets from The New York Times to The Guardian have examined everything from the lure of its coffee shops to its music-making garages, the attention has turned a town into a trend, a place into a verb. Once known as somewhere starving artists flocked for cheap housing and cheaper beer, but feared by tightly-wound suburbanites, it’s now a stop for tour buses looking for guys like Avery Barkley, the “dead sexy East Nashville hipster” on Nashville. READ MORE…
