(Subtitle:  How do we build Nashville on the Back Cove?)

by Bob McKillop

Nashville – songwriters in almost every genre turn toward this Mecca, kneel, and chant their song lyrics every day.  OK, maybe that’s laying it on a little thick, but even in these days of the music industry meltdown, Nashville remains the center of the songwriting universe.   Many Maine songwriters and performers have made the pilgrimage to this southern city.  Some have stayed, most have returned.  What are their stories, what were they seeking there, and can we build those special qualities here in Maine?

Terry James Swett:

Terry James Swett writes authentic, traditional country music tunes.  One of my favorites is “Sixteen Jenny Lane”, a co-write with Tom Manning; it’s about a songwriter who has to choose between his lover at home and his dream in Nashville. 

Terry grew up in Norway, Maine, and played drums in the typical array of high school rock bands that populate these stories.   The desire to play on his own convinced him eventually to migrate to the acoustic guitar, and he wrote his first song in his teens.  He never thought much about his talent until someone made an off-hand positie remark about it.  “You don’t realize what you’ve got until someone else makes a comment – if someone says you sound all right, it gives you confidence”.

Today, Terry has a successful sign making business, but songwriting and music have always been in his life, ever since those younger days.  A few years back, when he was “entering fifty-hood”, as he puts it, he had a week of dead time between trade shows in Florida.  He decided to spend it in Nashville.

“I’ve never felt better” Terry says of his brief stay in Music City.   “It was a warm, welcoming environment”.  He visited many of the open mic and writer’s night events in Nashville, where three or four performers get up on stage at once, and take turns playing their songs for three rounds or so.  His songs got a nice reception, and he received some advice and education during his stay.  His strongest connection was with Debi Champion, the host of the open mic night at the Commodore Sports Bar and Grille.

Terry had just a taste of the Nashville scene, but it convinced him that he wanted more.  He returned the following spring, and was almost tempted to make the permanent move, but the time was not quite right.  Lately, though, he has had some good experiences with co-writing, has written a song for cable television show that has some commercial potential.  He and his wife are investigating a permanent move south, and Tennessee is high on the list of favored destinations.  Proximity to Nashville, and a chance to pursue his musical ambitions, is a big part of the reason.

 

Matt Newberg:

Matt Newberg’s Nashville experience was not quite so pleasant, but was memorable nonetheless!  Matt grew up in Harpswell, Maine, and went to college at the University of Vermont in Burlington.  He studied guitar with acoustic blues virtuoso Paul Asbell, then toured New England with the blues/funk band “Turning Point”.  In the late nineties, he returned to Maine and settled in Portland, where he received a fair amount of attention for his early solo albums, “Going Back Home” and “Carpenters Hands”.  Matt earned the Portland Phoenix Best Music Award “Best Singer/Songwriter” title in 2002.

Shortly after that, Matt assembled a new band which he called “The Hurricane”, and they began recording demos and pitching them to major labels.  This resulted in an invitation to showcase at the Radio Café in Nashville, and contact from Ron Cotton, an A&R Executive for Red Horse Records. Matt remembers his meeting with Ron Cotton and Phil Lister, who eventually produced the record, as very exciting.  He was sitting in Cotton’s well-appointed Music Row office, with Lister, and playing them several of his songs.  The stuff dreams are made of.

Matt and the band raised their share of the money required for the deal, found a way to spend a week in Nashville, and flew south to make their record.  The studio experience was a great one – Everyone was pleased with the results of the studio work, which eventually became a CD entitled “Buffalo”.  The band got the artwork done and took delivery of the album, and celebrated at a CD release party at Brian Boru.  But they had heard nothing from Cotton relating to distribution, publicity, radio promotion, or other support that they had been promised by him on behalf of the label.  Cotton had scheduled a Nashville CD release party at the 3rd and Lindsey Bar and Grille, and the band packed up and drove south for the gig.

The release party was a nightmare.  The 3rd and Lindsey has a capacity of about 300 people, and there were maybe a dozen people there, mostly due to the street publicity the band had done that day.  Cotton finally shows up late, with a very young woman and one other “record exec”.  Matt says the evening and the entire trip, was a complete waste of time.  The band packed up and headed north afterwards; it was the beginning of the end for The Hurricane.  There were a few more shows, and they pitched their CD to a few more labels, to no effect.  The end came when Matt had booked the band into a venue in Bangor.  They showed up to find the place closed and boarded up. 

Newberg says that the experience made him put his music away for a couple of years.  But he landed a great job as a music teacher at the Hyde School in Bath, which led to connections with some famous parents of his students – specifically, Michael McDonald, John Hiatt, and Don Cook.  These famous fathers sponsored a trip to Nashville each year for the students at Hyde, and Matt became an advisor on the trip.  On his second Hyde trip to Music Row, he was able to put his anger aside and visit the studio and record label where he recorded the CD with Cotton and Lister.  He discovered that his experience with Cotton was not unique – Lister and the label fired him shortly after Newberg’s CD release party.  This helped Newberg get past the experience, and begin to plan for his music career again. 

He has sold a fair number of copies of “Buffalo” in the last few years, and he is recording a new 10 song CD in a project studio in Bath.  He plans to release it for digital distribution this spring.  He is also pitching to several labels again – he feels that he’s back in the drivers seat and ready for action!

So, what is it that makes Nashville so special?  What makes it “Music City”, and can Portland become something similar, so that Maine songwriters and performers don't need to go south - so that they can stay here and still sustain themselves?

Rod Picott's perspective:

Rod Picott is a Maine songwriter, performer, recording artist, and producer, who has landed in Nashville and is thriving there.  He has a well-informed perspective on that question. For him, it’s all about the reputation and branding that grows out of local cooperation between the many elements of a music scene, and the broadcasting of that reputation across a wide geographic area.

Regarding Nashville's special place in the music industry, Rod says, “The root reason is WSM broadcasting out of Nashville.  It was a massively powerful AM station back in the days when the airwaves were not so crowded.  The signal would go hundreds of miles, and people in Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Missouri, even Maryland – the entire southern part of the east coast – heard The Grand Ole Opry, Hank Williams, Lefty Frisell, and all this amazing music.  And because it was based in Nashville, all sorts of studios, music publishers, record labels, and venues grew up there.  It could have been any other city, if the radio station was based there.”

Rod was not sure how one would duplicate that situation in today’s world.  “Except that when people band together, when musicians, promoters, bands, venues, and radio stations band together; when you get a couple of AAA or Americana radio stations that work in conjunction with the clubs; when the clubs buy advertising on the stations, and when the stations do live shows on the air for artists coming to the venues; when the radio stations don’t pander to the record companies, but instead support the artists that their audience likes who are coming to town; well then, things start to happen.  But if even one of those pieces is missing, it’s hard to build anything.  If you don’t have that radio station, how do people know where to go, and what’s out there?”

The historic Nashville paradigm, consisting of a broadcast medium that blankets a large geographic area with a particular cultural idiom, but which is identified with a very specific location, is hard to imagine in today’s music industry.  Internet and satellite radio stations cover markets all over the world, but are not identified with a particular city.  Today’s crowded radio dial means that FM stations in specific cities don’t reach very far beyond the local area.

Perhaps the answer is an internet entity that reaches the world, but is focused on a local market.  The music consumers in the local market would enjoy the benefits of the information and music offered by the site, but at the same time, the positive reputation of the city that is featured on the site would be spread all over the globe.  That model might work in the same way that the WSM model worked in Nashville.

It’s hard to say – the music business is changing so rapidly.  But with rapid change comes great opportunity, and the next few years should show us what the new paradigm might be.  Portland, and the rest of Maine, has a great music scene with many of the elements that Rod Picott mentions.  Whether we can attract the missing pieces, and get the whole thing to coalesce into a viable music market, remains to be seen!