The Simple Life

When it comes to celebrity spotting, today's Nashvillian is about as immune to Toby Keith as an Angeleno is to Tobey Maguire. Stop a local on the street and ask if they've ever bumped into a famous face, and they're sure to name-drop.

Alan Jackson eats at the Pancake Pantry and Titans coach Jeff Fisher pumps his gas at the Exxon in Green Hills. Taylor Swift grazes at Noshville and John Hiatt grabs his own luggage at the airport. Wynonna Judd shops at Target and Amy Grant browses at Borders. Our country stars even man autograph booths for hours at the CMA Music Festival just to squiggle on a glossy and shake our hands.

All these notable visages and their just-plain-folks air may have left us a little blasé. But in 2006, when international big-timers Jack White and Nicole Kidman moved to Nashville, we suddenly had to re-evaluate our maps of the stars' homes. Hold the phones—we had two red-carpet heavyweights in our midst. Suddenly, we could gawk at what Kidman scooped off the salad bar at Wild Oats and find out whether White likes his Starbucks' lattes skinny.

And so could the national media, who couldn't have predicted they'd be shipping correspondents to a podunk town typically thought of as the rhinestone capital of America. Like it or not, they had to imagine Nashville as the sort of city mainstream celebrities would not only embrace as their own, but profess the kind of gushing affection that's typically reserved for getaways like St. Moritz or Belize.

After Kidman gave birth to her daughter at Baptist Hospital in July, an AP story snorted, "It's ironic that Nashville, the city that Robert Altman poked fun at with his '70s film Nashville and that spawned the cornpone TV series Hee Haw, is being celebrated as laid-back and hip—but perhaps that's what it's come to."

"Cows are the new swimming pools, apparently," sniped the U.K. Guardian.

This sentiment has long been echoed in the national entertainment media, who periodically raise an eyebrow and offer a puzzled grunt whenever a celebrity settles down in Music City. "Those dizzy celebrities and their wacky trends," they seem to shrug, as if Nashville could be an artists' colony in Topeka.

No offense, Topeka, but as many performers and songwriters will tell you, Nashville offers a provincial charm and professional hustle seldom found elsewhere. Our ability to play it real cool when spotting the anointed is attracting a new breed of artists to town—and they aren't here for the Nudie suits.

The likes of Nicole Kidman, Jack White, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Kid Rock, Donna Summer, Gunnar Nelson, Emerson Hart, Tom Keifer, Desmond Child, Mark Slaughter, Michelle Branch, Kelly Clarkson and Ben Folds all call Nashville home. And they're not just breezing in for a quaint photo-op.

Their reasons depend on industry and career phase. But they've all chosen the city to get down to work or take a load off—often both. And their giddy outsider's perspectives hold a gold-filigreed mirror up to the city we take for granted—the luscious landscapes, friendly hellos and down-home hospitality that resist trendy obsessions in favor of preserving a small-town way of life.

For those majestic untouchables, it's our distance from the film and rock industries that offers a sweet escape from the long lens of the paparazzi. For artists who last tangoed with the charts years ago, the transition to solo artist—and the multitudes of players with a studio infrastructure to back them—is a chance at a comeback. Then there's the temptation to go country—trading Hollywood's petroleum gloss for Nashville's old-fashioned boot polish.

But for nearly all of them, Music City's artist-camp vibe and workmanlike attitude toward songcraft promise a new education far from the headaches of the frenzy.

If you've ever heard the unforgettable choruses of "Livin' on a Prayer," "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" or "Livin' La Vida Loca," then you know the work of the one-man hit-factory Desmond Child. But what you might not know is that this Spielberg of power ballads, who's written more than 70 Top 40 singles, has been living in Nashville since 1991.

Like many artists who enjoyed chart success through the '80s until the pirates of grunge planted their flannel flags, Child found himself suddenly on the wrong side of cool. Still high off hits such as Joan Jett's "I Hate Myself for Loving You," he was hunkering down to work with Michael Bolton on "How Can We Be Lovers" and Cher's "We All Sleep Alone" when he got the news that the Seattle sound was king, and his career was kaput.

"The bands I was working with, like Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, for a minute, they weren't cool anymore," says Child, seated in a plush bus outside City Hall as he waits to film an episode of the Next Great American Country Star, on which he's a judge. With his radiant tan, slicked-back ponytail and jovial demeanor, he gives off the relaxed vibe of a restless Latin playboy who's happily found domesticity. (He also pulled up to the interview in a black Bentley—possibly the only Bentley in Nashville.)