The Listening Room's owner Chris Blair
It’s Sept. 25, roughly 24 hours before the soft reopening of The Listening Room Cafe in its new space across Fourth Avenue South from Rocketown. Owner Chris Blair, with a two-week salt-and-pepper beard and a neon-orange pencil wedged under the band of his dusty ball cap, is exhausted.
“I’ve been here around 6:30 or 7 in the morning until anywhere from 11 to midnight every single day, seven days a week, for seven, eight weeks now,” Blair tells the Scene. “There’s still a lot to do. … But to be able to open the doors tomorrow and be able to finally show people what we’ve been building is really awesome.”
The Listening Room’s new location is just the latest new beginning in its 11-year history, during which it has hosted sets by Keith Urban, Chris Stapleton and myriad up-and-coming Nashville songwriters. Blair launched the venue in Franklin in 2006, moved to Cummins Station in 2008, and then moved to the previous location on Second Avenue in SoBro in 2013. Blair says he lost his lease at that spot because the landlord wants to build luxury condos. The new space, at one time a showroom for International Harvester, is “a little bit bigger than I would have picked,” he says, “but I just stumbled onto it.” As a venue, it checks all the boxes: more room to accommodate frequently sold-out shows, close proximity to tourist-wooing Lower Broadway and, most importantly, a 15-year lease.
“I’m tired of moving,” Blair says. “I’m not moving again.”
In a time of escalating rents and rapid development in Nashville, one thing that isn’t changing is the vital role of writers’ rounds in crafting great songs and helping move a songwriter’s career along by getting their work heard — not only by industry players, but by ordinary folks who buy concert tickets. The Nashville space most associated with rounds is, of course, The Bluebird Cafe, which has a storied relationship with country music dating back to the club’s founding in 1982. Its small capacity of roughly 90 and its iconic reputation, built steadily over years of growth and boosted dramatically by its role on Nashville, make it more of a destination than a songwriters’ workshop.
“The Bluebird just sells out so quickly these days … that it is often difficult to get into a lot of shows if you didn’t plan weeks in advance,” says Greg Gallo, senior creative director of the publishing firm Big Deal Music Group. Because of The Listening Room’s size — 180 seats on Second Avenue, 350 at the new spot (with an additional 150 in a separate dining room and another 100 on an outdoor patio) — Gallo says he can often slide in at the last minute to check out a round, which makes his job of scouting and monitoring talent that much easier.
Both The Bluebird and The Listening Room play host to established songwriters and legends as well as those just getting their start, but playing The Bluebird is viewed by many as a career highlight. The Listening Room’s bread-and-butter, conversely, is showcasing songwriters well before they break, and its larger audiences make it a proving ground for what’s next in Nashville.
“Most of our girls that play are new to Nashville,” says Helena Capps, one of the founders of Song Suffragettes, a round that’s been held weekly at The Listening Room since 2014. “They just moved here, or they’ve been going to Belmont and they haven’t been found yet. If we did The Bluebird, we wouldn’t be able to get exposure to an audience like that.”
The Suffragettes are just one example of how powerful the venue has become for Nashville songwriters. According to Capps, of the 185 women who have performed as part of the round, seven have since notched record deals, and another 35 have signed publishing deals. Carly Pearce, a Suffragettes alum who will release her debut record Every Little Thing on Oct. 13 through Big Machine Records — home to Taylor Swift and Reba McEntire among others — says she wouldn’t have progressed to the point she’s at now if it weren’t for an estimated 150 performances at The Listening Room.
“A lot of songs on my album I played for many years at The Listening Room, and saw the crowd reactions,” Pearce says. “This is really a great opportunity for up-and-coming artists and songwriters to test out songs and see if people gravitate toward them.”
The Listening Room faces a few challenges in its new location, not the least of which is the natural barrier of Korean Veterans Boulevard, which separates it from the Lower Broadway crowd. But with its updated decor featuring glossy concrete floors, aged wood, matte-black fixtures and Edison bulbs, it feels comfortable despite the construction dust. Chris Blair has built it, and now hopefully the audience will come. The songwriters themselves are already onboard.
“My best friends and I have spent so many nights sitting in those four chairs, telling stories, sharing songs with each other, singing,” says Pearce. “It’s like a family. Chris has made it a family. It’s like a second home.”
Email music@nashvillescene.com
