Nashville Song Quotes

You’re still several calamities short of a country song, Jordan. If your truck breaks down or your dog dies, I’ll put in a call to Nashville for you. In the meantime, suck it up.

Maverick Simon was Hollywood and Nashville, while she was just a mechanic in a small town in Maine. It almost sounded like some hokey country song.

Here’s the point. If I had waited until the songs were finished, this thing might never have happened. If I had merely tinkered with these songs for all the years it took to finally record them, chances are I would have moved on to other things and never given it a try. It wouldn’t have grown into what it was meant to be. You can think and plan and think some more, but none of that is half as important as doing something, however imperfect or incomplete it is. Intention trumps execution, remember? Sometimes you book the tour before the songs are written. Sometimes you stand at the altar and say “I do” without any clue how you and your wife are going to make it. Sometimes you move to Nashville with no money in the bank and no real prospects. Sometimes you start with nothing and hope it all works out. Not sometimes—every time. All you really have is your willingness to fail, coupled with the mountain of evidence that the Maker has never left nor forsaken you.

And we'll let the world dance around us while you lie here in my arms. The beat of your heart is all the music I need to hear. I spent my whole life searching for this melody, so I'll listen while I hold you near.

Think of Chicago as a piece of music, perhaps,” he continued. “In it you can hear the thousands of years of people living here and fishing and hunting, and then bullets and axes, and the whine of machinery, and the bellowing of cattle, and the shriek of railroads, and the thud of fists and staves and crowbars, and a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. And the murmur of the lake like a basso undertone. Ships and storms, snow and fire. To the north the vast dark forests, and everywhere else around the city rolling fields of farms, and all roads leading to Chicago, which rises from the plains like Oz, glowing with light and fire at night, drawing people to it from around the world. A roaring city, gunfire and applause and thunder. Gleaming but made of bone and stone. Bitter cold and melting hot and clotheslines hung in the alleys and porches like the webbing of countless spiders. A city without illusions but with vaulting imaginations and expectations. A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea. An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country. Perhaps the American city—no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil. Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and venal, almost a small nation, sprawling and vulgar and foul and beautiful, cold and cruel and wonderful. Its music is the blues, of course. Sad and uplifting at once, elevating and haunting at the same time. You sing so that you do not weep. You have no choice but to sing. So you raise up your voice and sing of love and woe, and soon another voice joins in, and you sing together, for a while, for a time, perhaps a brief time, but perhaps not.…

Jamie used the time away from me to do some soul-searching. She finally also did something she’d thought about for a long time. She walked into an Army recruitment office in Nashville and joined the military. She didn’t discuss it with me beforehand. Instead she called and said, “I’m joining the Army. It’s active duty and I’m going to be a truck driver with an airborne contract.” Shocked, I blurted out, “You’re going to do what? No you’re not.” “What do you mean? I’m gonna be a truck driver in a convoy.” I knew she was referring to a seventies country song she likes. Only this wasn’t a country song, this was real life. “Are you crazy? This is not a game. You will hate being a truck driver. You don’t even know if you’ll like being in the military. Go National Guard or Reserves and see if you like it.” “They said I’m already in. Basic is not for another few months but I’m in and I can’t change it.” “Yes you can. You are not in yet. You are not in the military. That was just a recruiter telling you that. Why aren’t you going in as an officer? You have a degree. You can make more money.” She seemed annoyed that I was raining on her parade, but I think it was also dawning on her that maybe I was right and she hadn’t done the research. “They told me that it’s not really that much more.” I explained to her, “They are lying to you. It is a lot more.” I had no problem with her joining the military. If that’s what she wanted to do, I supported it. But I was going to make sure she made the smartest moves she could make if that was in fact what she wanted to do with her life. I certainly wasn’t going to let her be talked into a lower-paid, higher-risk job.

Our Kotex commercial airs the same week the article is released. We were hired to design something “pad-centric” when "Nashville Combat" was in postproduction and we were subsisting on lentils and six-packs of PBR. We were instructed to steal some thunder from tampon usage with a “fun, light-hearted spot” showcasing the company’s new Super Light Close-to-You sanitary napkin. “Isn’t that a Carpenters song?” Mel said after they approached us.

Smoke hung heavy in the air. Will’s eyes stung. His throat. His nose. And the crackling. God, the crackling fire was like the devil laughing. Vera was in that house. Mikey gripped his arm. “Hold on, Will—” Will lunged forward. “Vera—” “Whoa, Will.” Mikey’s grip tightened. “Stop.” “The hell I will. Vera—” “Billy?” One of the cops approached him. Said a bunch of words. Helped Mikey hold Will back. Vera was in that house. Vera, her trusty wooden body, her frets, her new strings. Vera, who’d had his back everywhere from Pickleberry Springs to Nashville to New York to LA, from seedy bars to stadiums. Vera, who’d helped him write his first song. His last song. Every song in between.

The trick then has to be letting go of the safe, the known and reaching out for what we can’t yet see.

Louise, who at twenty-three could easily look like a sixteen-year-old boy, wore trousers, a vest, and a tie. Joan wore a chic dress with a nipped-in waist and wide skirt, her red hair in a wavy, shoulder-length pageboy. The juke box in the bar was a good one, with Ray Charles singing “Hey Now” and new records by B. B. King, whose performances on Beale Street were a Memphis sensation. The most popular song of the night, hands down, was Kitty Wells strumming “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Wells was from Nashville, and the burgeoning country music industry in their home state was a subject of fascination for both women. Louise, intrigued by the fashion for cowboy costumes and yodeling, could do a fair imitation of Hank Williams. Louise had a new swagger that Joan hadn’t seen in her before. She was more assertive and suffered fools even less. When a pretty young woman stopped by their table to compliment Joan’s hair and flirtatiously ask, “Why don’t you cut it short?” Louise sent her on her way with a proprietary growl, saying, “Leave her alone. She’s not gay.

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike. Some people find this idea repulsive, because it seems to relegate the artist to the level of trickster, manipulator, and deceiver—a kind of self-justifying onanist. They would prefer to see music as an expression of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological makeup and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common. In that sense, the conventional idea of authorship is questionable. Not that I don’t want credit for the songs I’ve written, but what constitutes authorship is maybe not what we would like it to be. This queasiness about rethinking how music works is also connected with the idea of authenticity: the idea that musicians who appear to be “down-home,” or seem to be conveying aspects of their own experience, must therefore be more “real.” It can be disillusioning to find out that the archetypical rock and roll persona is an act, and that none of the “country” folk in Nashville really wear cowboy hats (well, except during their public appearances and photo shoots).

Not to mention, assuming an owner of a business is a guy is just not my mom’s MO. Long before she dreamed up the idea for Big League Burger and helped build it up to the veritable empire it is today, she was almost too progressive a feminist for a place like Nashville, where she jokingly but not-quite-jokingly would clamp her hands over our ears anytime a line in a country song said something about girls with painted-on jeans or sitting on tailgates, saying it would make us 'the complicit kind of cowgirl.

Kristofferson’s songs, particularly, explored sensual love and desperate negotiations with personal devils in a rambling ballad style that sharply contrasted with the strictly tempered verse that had dominated country music for decades. He engendered a freedom of expression in Nashville’s music business, and, in his wake, other freedoms emerged.

But one concert stood head and shoulders above the rest, sonically: Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court on May 25, the finale of a five-concert run, during which Zeppelin played a three-hour, 20-song set, including a three-song acoustic segment. Comparing Wings (a group unashamed to put out a nursery rhyme as a single) to Led Zeppelin was like comparing a comfy pullover with a studded leather suit, but just as the Bowie concert in Nashville had turned Paul on to the appeal of a live horn section, watching one of Britain’s premier rock groups up close was eye-opening. “The basis for our [1975–76] show was a Led Zeppelin concert we saw in London,”54 Paul happily acknowledged.

Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and venal, almost a small nation, sprawling and vulgar and foul and beautiful, cold and cruel and wonderful.