Perhaps the fire of creativity burns brightest in empty spaces, void of distraction and frills. Otherwise, the studio was just a plain room with a few chairs against a round table and an open laptop. Shiny platinum records hung in frames on the wall, along with album cover art featuring singers I knew nothing about-though based on their hairstyles, I guessed they were from the nineties. Singer/songwriter Billy Montana at Curb Publishing on Music Row. He looks like a late-career Michael Stipe and an early-season Walter White from Breaking Bad, and he kindly welcomed me into his studio to show me how country music gets born. Singer/songwriter Billy Montana is a true country star-a man with real farming cred who can sing, play guitar and make up music with wide appeal. I parked at Music Square East and entered the little wooden house known as Curb Publishing, where I shook hands with somebody more famous than me.
#Big rich town who wrote this song movie#
This is what Wikipedia entries and movie montages have taught me about writing songs, and now I was in the middle of it all, right here on Music Row, America’s suburban factory for hit music. Although, I imagine some songwriters have stayed the night, rapping around a table, plunking away on instruments and humming, laughing, ordering pizza until they nail it. It’s not that kind of place.Īlso, nobody actually lives here-all these pretty little houses are songwriting studios, signposted with humble brags like “Home to 5 Platinum Hits!” or “Dolly Parton did something artistic here” and so on. No way you’d score a full-size candy bar in Music Row.
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Music Row is the kind of neighborhood that looks safe enough for trick-or-treating but simply not worth the effort on Halloween-dozens of low-rise bungalows where sweet old grannies might hand out Sweet Tarts or Bit-O-Honeys, or if you’re really lucky, a fun-size Snickers. I was ready to go home, but I was still on the clock, and the job at hand was country music.
![big rich town who wrote this song big rich town who wrote this song](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/12/30/arts/30sam-fender2/30sam-fender2-articleLarge.jpg)
I was supposed to be writing about the charm of the South, but the charm had faded away like the peeling paint of warehouse walls that mark the more silent blocks of the Tennessee capital. I was sweating all the time, forever dining on meatloaf and twice-fried chicken, my teeth aching from too much sweet tea. I had already been traveling for three weeks-from Louisiana, then across the empty green swamps of Mississippi and Alabama, and up through hot-as-hell Georgia.
#Big rich town who wrote this song full#
Thus I arrived in Nashville with a big old suitcase full of prejudice and only a few days to prove myself wrong.