Sharon Van Etten at The 5 Spot, 1/22/2011
In the past decade-and-a-half, music and music scenes in Nashville have changed an astonishing amount — not all for the better, not all for the worse, and not all of a sudden. One thing that’s remained pretty consistent is East Nashville venue The 5 Spot’s role as a place to reliably drop in and hear some fantastic music from up-and-coming locals, well-established locals and touring acts of all kinds.
Recently, venue co-owner Todd Sherwood unearthed an old hard drive that houses a trove of soundboard recordings made in the late Aughts and early 2010s. Peruse the venue’s Soundcloud account and you’ll find gems like Tristen performing a rocked-up rendition of “Special Kind of Fear” from her 2011 LP Charlatans at the Garden Gate with The Privates, Caitlin Rose doing “For the Rabbits” with Hammertorch as her band, and Sharon Van Etten playing “One Day” from her 2010 record Epic. (It seems likely that Lance Conzett’s photo above, taken in January 2011, is from that show; Julianna Barwick stepped in for harmony vocals. Also, Conzett and his fellow Scene contributor Seth Graves filmed a couple songs for us that night, including that one.)
It’s a treat for both longtime local music followers and folks newer to the scene (and the Scene), with contributions from Ghostfinger, Hands Down Eugene, Hotpipes, How I Became the Bomb, The States and more. Chris Crofton, who would later don the crown as the Scene’s Advice King, does “Dickerson Pike” with The Alcohol Stuntband. Creech Holler — a band that included Jeff Zentner, now a lauded local author, back in the day — is in here. So is And the Relatives; why yes, that is Scene editor-in-chief D. Patrick Rodgers you hear on drums.
The account has been around for a while. You’ll notice a couple of older tracks including a “Country Western Live Mixtape” uploaded nine years ago — pardon me while I cough up some dust, because I don’t want to believe that means it was 2015 — featuring performances from Nikki Lane, Courtney Jaye and more. Here’s hoping Sherwood is able to salvage some more tracks soon. Below, I’ve embedded Glossary’s catalog standout “Little Caney.” If it’s from the show I think it is, the Long Live All of Us album release party in October 2011, I was at that show myself — shooting video for the band and making unintentional cameos in longtime Scene freelance photog Steve Cross’s shots.
