The East Side has long been attractive to working musicians. Singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists of all stripes have wandered streets with names like Fatherland, Chapel, Holly, and Woodland for decades, all with the dream in their heads of a music-centered life. Maybe East Nashville is nurturing ground for the spiritual yearning musicians share. Or maybe it’s just the affordability (for the time being, at least). Either way, there’s an abundance of incredibly gifted folks within a fairly small radius of one another leading music-centered lives. With so many to choose from, how does one begin to approach the process of elimination required by the confines of a magazine? Truth be told, by not having a process, which in of itself reveals the verdant and diverse garden that is our music scene.
The “angle” for this annual music issue, as it were, was to take a glimpse inside the head space of a group of working musicians, some younger, some older, but all demonstrating the level of devotion demanded by a musical life. As Bobby Bare Jr. puts it, “… it’s 90 per cent truck driver, nothing glamorous or exciting.”
Enjoy.
