Destination 2018: NashvilleBy Jewly Hight

On Nashville’s Music Row, a particular kind of soirée routinely interrupts the workday: the No. 1 Party. Often held either in the atriums or on the rooftops of music-biz office buildings, these gatherings celebrate the chart-topping success of individual songs. It’s tradition for such events to be documented by big group photos: The song’s cowriters, the guests of honor, pose front and center with their plaques, flanked by representatives from their publishing companies and the performing-rights organizations that collect their royalties. Also included, of course, are the artist and producer who recorded the composition, as well as managers and executives from the record label. Inevitably, fellow songwriters are also on hand. “You’ll see people at these parties who literally have no stake in the song,” says writer-producer Luke Laird, who’s been honored at numerous such events for hits he’s written for artists such as Carrie Underwood, Little Big Town and Eric Church. “They’re just there to support their friends.”

The culture of professional songwriting is the subject of It All Begins with a Song: The Story of the Nashville Songwriter, an excellent new documentary produced by the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, the city’s marketing arm. “Instead of doing a typical tourism sales video, we just told a story,” says Deana Ivey, the NCVC’s chief marketing officer—specifically, the story of what happens behind the scenes in “the largest community of songwriters in the world.”

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Nashville’s songwriting culture has become one of the city’s defining strengths and greatest selling points. But, for the often-overlapping Nashville business and social communities, that wasn’t always the case. “They thought that the music industry made us look provincial,” says Janet Miller, CEO of commercial real estate firm Colliers Nashville. For generations, Nashville’s social elite fancied their city “the Athens of the South,” emphasizing its academic institutions and its patronage of the fine arts. A replica of the Greek Parthenon, erected in a city park in 1897, stands as a symbol of those cultural aspirations.

But when the Grand Ole Opry’s radio and television shows found a national audience and helped spawn a local recording scene, Nashville’s deepening association with down-home music threatened to undermine the city’s carefully cultivated image of respectability. Even after the Opryland theme park, which opened in 1972, became a major tourist attraction on the strength of stage shows that paid tribute to country music’s roots, some ambivalence lingered about Nashville becoming known as Music City.

No one was more responsible for changing that attitude than Butch Spyridon, the soft-spoken, peripatetic president of the NCVC. Now in his 27th year in the role, Spyridon intuitively understood what a powerful marketing tool country music could be. So he spearheaded a music-centric branding campaign, seeking input and investment from diverse sectors of the city’s business community. “Vanderbilt has used Nashville’s Music City reputation to promote the university since then, and they didn’t do that before,” recalls Ivey. In the new Nashville, upscale hotels incorporate guitars into their décor, congenial messages from country stars greet travelers over the airport’s public-address system and the gleaming, 2 million-square-foot convention complex downtown is called the Music City Center. First-time visitors to Nashville—and there are more and more of them—will likely never realize that it was not always so. And while those visitors may well know the people who sing Nashville’s songs, it’s the songwriters who lay the foundation of Nashville’s collaborative culture.

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“Professional songwriting in Nashville is not what people think it is,” hit-writer Brett James explains. “Most people think that songwriters smoke weed and walk around the streets and hope that inspiration hits. That’s sort of a good way to be a poor songwriter.”

Songwriter Luke Dick has enjoyed success with collaborations that combine preparation and playfulness. “Burning Man,” the hopelessly catchy opening track on Dierks Bentley’s new album The Mountain, is a great example. While wrapping up a writing session at his studio with fellow tunesmith Bobby Pinson, Dick accidentally pressed the space bar on his computer, and a track he’d been tinkering with on his own piped through the speakers. Though there weren’t yet any words, just a melody and rhythmic, nonsense syllables layered over the instruments, Pinson immediately heard potential. First, the two writers tackled the chorus—“I’m a little bit holy water, but still a little bit burning man”— hoping that it would capture what Dick calls “the diametrically opposed things that you want in life, the constant tension of being a human.” Once they’d settled on the concept, says Dick, “Bobby ran away with a verse, then I ran away with a verse. It was a real interplay.” The finished track does indeed capture some of the constant tension of being human—and it’s incredibly catchy.

Songwriters work together, bounce ideas back and forth, and just generally cheer each other on.

As the story shows, in Nashville, songwriters work together, bounce ideas back and forth, and just generally cheer each other on. Cowriting appointments often take on a neighborly quality, since many of them happen in the quaint houses converted into offices along Music Row. Each morning Laird reports to the stone bungalow headquarters of Creative Nation, the publishing and management company he runs with his wife, Beth, and spends an hour or two noodling with lyrics, riffs or programmed beats. “I play like I did when I was a kid in my room,” he says. His hope: to come up with concepts that his cowriters might want to pursue with him once they arrive later in the morning. The casual atmosphere doesn’t hamper productivity. “There’s an unspoken expectation: ‘Yeah, let’s have fun, but let’s leave with something at the end of the day,’” Laird says.