Nashville Quotes

I moved cities for about four months to try to provoke some inspiration and put myself in an uncomfortable situation where I would be meeting new people and have a change in locale. I look back at my career and one of my favorite records I ever made was right after I moved to Nashville.

Every July, I look forward to taping a Christmas show - in July in Nashville. In 98-degree weather. I love it.

I grew up listening to everything, and when I got signed to a record deal out of Nashville, that was my introduction to what was happening in country music.

Nashville's like any other hometown - after a while, it's stifling.

In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around.

When I was in Nashville, I went to our Macy's and went and tried on all the Hannah Montana stuff. Then I said, 'This is weird, I'm wearing my face.'

Now that I'm in 'Nashville,' the thing that I'm loving the most is co-writing. You walk into the room and you shake hands with someone you've never met before and you walk out four hours later and you've got this thing... sharing ideas and everything, it's almost magical, like a miracle.

I like this town, it's really great. They've put me in The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. This town is about music. It's about the kind of music I like.

I was writing for a publishing company in this old building right next to the RCA Victor Studio in Nashville. We were on the top floor, and Combine Music was on the bottom floor. I was friends with all those guys.

I see interracial couples all the time in Nashville. I'm a Jew in Nashville. I'm a gay person in Nashville. It's a non-issue in most of the time. That's a huge leap forward.

Nashville has a formula, and it works a lot of the time, but it wasn't right for me. They're afraid to step outside the box - even though, with me, my success came because I was outside of the box to begin with.

Pilgrims travel to Jerusalem to see the Holy Land, and the foundations of their faith. People go to Washington, D.C. to see the workings of government, and the foundation of our country. And fans flock to Nashville to see the foundation of country music, the Grand Ole Opry.

I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.

Man, if anybody knew the path that we've been on, no one in their right mind would ever try to duplicate it. That's something Nashville always tries to do, though. If something is successful, they try to repeat it by telling other people, "Hey, do what that guy did." I just don't think it works that way. The first one who gest there, the one that cuts the path ... it's always the roughest path but I think it's got the most reward at the end.

I could get drunk and run around Nashville naked. But I won't because I want to set a good example for my fans. I think they deserve to have a role model.

You know Nashville, there's people that are ten times more talented than me, ten times better singer than me, song writer than me, but for some reason you get the ball and now - and now you run with it. And you do the best you can.

I was in Nashville and I was having just the most amazing time there, discovering who I was as an artist because that is such a music city. Everyone there is so friendly and inspiring and down to jam.

Different people have different ways of doing things. For me, becoming a songwriter first and falling in love with the Nashville songwriting community and the process of songs and getting better and putting more in what I wanted to say, was absolutely vital in me even wanting to be an artist.

I realize I was more of a curiosity to the older Nashville artists than the new ones.

From the moment I stepped foot in Music City I have had a love affair with the people and burgeoning culinary scene. This city's long, highly-respected cultural history, coupled with the recent growth and development is inspiring. I could not be happier with my decision and I'm truly excited to call Nashville my home.

I didn't come to Nashville to put on a cowboy hat and pretend to be a country singer. My attraction to Nashville as Music City is the variety and flexibility: the fact that there's so many musicians at your disposal, so many amazing studios and talented people that you can draw from. ... I try to be myself, but at the same time I'm learning a lot, and I'm pulling from not only from the well of inspiration that I'm getting from Nashville, but I'm pulling from my roots.

I think it took me a while to convince Nashville that what I do is genuine and my heart's in the right place, and I love country music.

As far as in my adult life, it kinda started (with) writing first 'cause I went to school in Nashville. I mean, not Nashville but close to Nashville, and I met my managers in L.A. at a convention randomly. And then, it kinda just started from there. And then, I got my publishing deal.

If you can't play guitar and sing in Nashville, you might as well just be a construction worker.

I went to my dad when I was 17 and said, 'I want to be a country music star.' Which every dad loves to hear. And he said, 'I want you to go to college.' So we had a discussion. And I'm pretty stubborn. I'm a lot like him. And he said, 'If you go to college and graduate, I'll pay your first six months of rent in Nashville.' So he bribed me.

If I needed to record, I'd head to the coast or Nashville, one or the other.

Nashville was totally different than I ever dreamed. I had only seen the music business on television and been to a couple of concerts. I had no clue.

Sometimes I have parties at my house in Nashville and it's clothing-optional, and we just body-paint each other and run around, and I have a giant bed. I'm very much in touch with that side of myself.

I love chocolate, and I love to shop - just give me a good boutique. I like mall scenarios, too, because there's more right there at hand. I think Nashville could use some better shopping!

Recording in Nashville was absolutely essential to get the sound, the musicians, the atmosphere, the warmth... There are just cult places like that in the world, like Chicago for the blues or New York for jazz. Nothing sounds the same in Nashville as it does elsewhere. Nashville is the Mecca of country music and everyone knows it.

For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.

Roy Acuff was the first country music star to buy a home in a fashionable section of Nashville. The real estate man said, 'Mr. Acuff, how do you plan to take care of this?' since the house was very expensive at the time. Roy said, 'Would cash be all right?'

Man, I live in Nashville. I know how good other songwriters and singers are around here. There's a wealth of talent in this town, not to mention the people who shoot in for a week or two to try their hand on lower Broad or the other venues around town.

Nashville used to have more integrity than just looking at the bottom line.

I had been on the road for a long time and was not really getting anywhere. Bob Johnston, a friend of mine, had taken over Columbia in Nashville. He asked me if I wanted to come down. I did - thank God I did.

I was always drawn to the roots music, bluegrass, blues, early rock - Sun Records, Elvis [Presley]. And I still love that music to this day. Memphis never gets the credit. It's much more musically rich than Nashville ever will be. Nashville manufactured that hokey-hillbilly image way back.

I think country music is a champion of women. That stuff coming out of Nashville now wants to see a woman looking good in the kitchen whipping up some biscuits.

I don't think I ever saw Hank with anybody, say, 'Let's go write a song.' One Sunday morning we left Nashville to go to Birmingham to do a matinee and a night, and he said, 'Hand me that tablet up there.' And he wrote down, 'Hey, good lookin', what you got cookin'' and before we got to Birmingham it was finished.

The first time I go out to Nashville, ever (at this point I had only heard the rumors about what it's like) I had three writing sessions set up. The first two canceled on me. I was kind of pissed off at that point. So I just went back to my hotel room and started writing. And even though I've been to L.A. and experienced a lot of things, at the end of the day I just start to feel like I'm playing acoustically at the first bar I ever played at.

I didn't want to be a solo Westlife - covers and ballads - and the reason I signed with Capitol Records was because they wanted me to write songs myself. It was pretty scary, but they put me in a studio in Nashville with some new songwriters, and the results were pretty good.

Because Olivia Newton-John wasn't from Nashville, they didn't like her winning our awards. I've got no complaints.

My favorite place in the whole world is Nashville. Because it's my home, it's Music City. It's like, everybody there is so artistic and so creative, and nice! Everybody's really friendly.

My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.

When I was growing up, Nashville was the place to go if you had songs to sell and thought you had talent and wanted to tour and be on Grand Ole Opry [radio show]. It was the big deal back in those days to play the Grand Ole Opry. And you could travel around the world saying, "Hi, I'm Willie from the Grand Ole Opry".

I just got an apartment here in Nashville, and I invested in a Queen-sized bed because I'm like, "I haven't had a big bed since I was a kid." I woke up this morning on one side, like, in "coffin position."

I want to go to Nashville and get cracking on this album.

I think, to be honest, sort of emanated from the initial work of somebody else instead of SCLC. If you take Albany; I don't know whether you recall how Albany got started. There were two little guys who went up there first. One was Cordell Hull who was then in his teens - not Cordell Hull - Cordell Reagan, who came out of the Nashville movement, and Charles Sherrod, who came out of the Richmond, Virginia, movement.

In terms of American Horror Story and Nashville, what attracted me to those, and Friday Night Lights, for that matter, is that they felt like something innovative and something that we hadn't seen before. As an actor, that's exciting.

Going to Nashville to meet the in-laws was the first time when I'd been in America and not been seen as some sort of eccentric character with a cute accent.

My absolute favorite meal in Nashville is sweet-potato pancakes at Pancake Pantry.