Love Letters to Nashville

For all its growing pains, its many changes, its foibles and its faults, Nashville is an exceptional city, one full of hidden gems and special people. For our annual Love Issue, we at the Scene have designed some Valentines and written a series of sweet nothings to all the elements of Nashville — old and new — that have kept us smitten over the years. From the caring hands at Vanderbilt’s neonatal intensive care unit to the kids who keep punk shows happening in the Music City underground; from our feathered friends above to the bustle of our local supermall; from our fair city’s booming dining scene to the women of Nashville who choose to stand up to injustice and more. Follow along as we tell our little town why we love it so, and feel free to print and cut out some of the Valentines — our little reminders that all are welcome in our fair city.

To Nashville’s Many Lost-Pet Facebook Groups, Next Door, and Especially Metro Animal Care and Control,Thank you all for helping me find my impossibly adorable kitten Michelle “Mickey” Obama. On a recent Sunday morning — a mere eight days after I adopted the 2-pound, perennially purring, head-bunting calico grimalkin and she became the latest light of my life — I woke up to find her missing. I turned the house upside-down, to no avail. Then I hit the streets, calling and looking for her, which felt like looking for a heartbreakingly cute needle in a haystack. I printed up missing posters and delivered them door to door. It was well after sundown at this point, and clearly this kitty who’d never been outside was lost, hiding, probably terror-stricken, possibly hurt, possibly preyed-upon or catnapped. The kicker: I’d planned on taking Mickey to get tagged and microchipped the day she absconded.

I was gutted.

So I turned to the internet, where I discovered a thousands-strong network of animal-loving good Samaritans who offered crucial advice and APB-style alerts. I live in Sylvan Park, and I first posted Mickey’s missing info on the Sylvan Park Neighborhood Association Facebook page, where a commenter directed me to the highly active and informative Bellevue and West Nashville Lost and Found Pets page. Over the next day, I followed up with posts on the Nashville’s Lost & Found Pets page and the insanely active Skippy Lou’s Lost & Found Pets — Nashville, TN page, as well as on Next Door, a neighborhood-centric digital kiosk I’m embarrassed to admit I wasn’t even aware of. And this is how the internet helped bring my beloved kitten home.

Within hours, my posts had been shared by scores of neighbors I’d never met. I received emails, comments and texts from strangers offering to help, or alerting me to possible Mickey sightings. Perhaps the best piece of advice was that I fill out a missing-pet report with Metro Animal Care and Control via PetHarbor.com. If you ever have a pet go missing, DO THIS! After four lonely days scouring the streets and alleys in vain, I felt pretty damn dejected.

So imagine my glee the following Thursday morning when I got a call from MACC informing me that they had a purring calico — a calico who matched the photo of Mickey I’d uploaded — holed up in kitty jail. I’ll almost certainly never know or get to personally thank the good-hearted stranger who found Mickey, five days after she disappeared, running through the streets of God-knows-where in the middle of the night and brought her to a 24-hour animal hospital, which made sure she was healthy. Thank you. And Mickey might still be in the pound — or worse — had it not been for MACC’s No Lost Pets program, in which staff work to match incoming cats and dogs to photos of the missing. And I might still be walking through alleys shaking cat toys and calling Mickey’s name were it not for the vigilant folks in Music City’s local Facebook communities.

Mickey meows thanks too.

Yours,

Adam Gold

Dear Janitor’s Closet in the Arcade,

You are a masterpiece of unintentional art. I’m sorry for staring, but you’ve got those big picture windows that are just kind of hanging there, uncovered and exposed. To weary gallery-goers exhausted by increasingly trafficked First Saturday Art Crawls, you’re a visual respite filled with broom handles, file folders and empty coffee cans.

I must have art on my mind, because I can’t stop thinking about you in those terms. And honestly, I’m not usually this forward, but has anyone ever told you that you’re gorgeous? That your effortlessly retro style is intoxicating? I wouldn’t be surprised to find a rotary phone or a box of Cracker Jacks on one of your shelves. I bet you smell amazing, too, like pencil shavings and Lemon Pledge. Not only that, but you really make me think, you know? Like, are you seriously just the room where the Arcade maintenance workers hang their windbreakers, or are you hiding the city’s secrets inside some Rube Goldberg machine that I could trip if I only knew where to drop the marble?

I want to stage a play in you. I want to leave mysterious notes on your dusty windowsill. I want to hang a different sign above your front door every week. You make me want to quote ArtForum, baby.

Yours,

Laura Hutson

Dear Community Radio DJs,

Rush hour sure was lonesome during the years I couldn’t hear you. But ever since Radio Free Nashville’s signal got a boost and WXNA went on the air, I can tune in to something that makes me fall in love with music all over again, even as I inch my way along the I-440/I-24 interchange.

Over on WRFN’s Fringe Radio Show, AL-D does the hard work of sorting through hip-hop from around the region and shining a much-deserved light on the best (not to mention hunting down the clean versions you’re allowed to play on the radio — the real “not all heroes wear capes” part of the gig). On WXNA, J-Mar and Aardvark might talk shop with Renata Soto, Mary Mancini or high school kids whose families came from other nations to make Nashville their home, between slices of disco, reggae, punk, soul and obscure New Wave; Randy Fox and Kels Koch cut up like class clowns as they plow through rockabilly and country so weird you couldn’t make it up (they go full Marx Brothers when Pete Wilson drops in, and that’s the best); Bob Irwin and Paul Glavin’s back-to-back showcases of rare vinyl make this impoverished crate-digger feel like Uncle Pennybags on payday (shout out, too, to WRFN’s Mr. C and his treasure trove of 7-inches on The Flipside).

And that’s just a tiny slice. Please don’t think I’m forgetting you, Janet Timmons, Eric Babcock, D-Funk, Heather Lose, Asher Horton, Kathryn Edwards — I could keep going. And I hope you do, too.

Love,

Stephen Trageser

Dear Nashville Restaurants,

The crush first started when he took me to Mirror, early in 2002. I was dating someone else then, and he and I were just friends, but the pecan-encrusted trout served, I think, on top of mashed potatoes, took my breath away. I was so young then, the idea of having enough money to order a bottle of wine at dinner still such a novelty. It felt so grown-up, going out to eat in a city when I lived in a small college town.

It was a year-and-half later that the crush grew deeper. I was visiting Nashville again, and he took me to Sunset Grill. We had a pinot noir — Saintsbury maybe — on the patio, and I had the vegetable pasta. That was the night everything changed, that we confessed we didn’t want to just be friends anymore.

Because it was open late and I never got into town before 9 p.m., Sunset Grill became our place. We’d try a different wine every time. I fell in love with him, and I fell in love with wine, good wine, the rituals and the regions.

We dined elsewhere, of course. We always went out, he never cooked. I always dressed up. He spent so much money on me. Park Café and Germantown Café, but also The Villager — and Robert’s, because there were no crowds to fight back then. I felt like I deserved it, all the expensive dresses I charged on my credit card and all the Châteauneuf-du-Pape we ordered after deciding pinot was passé.

One year we spent Valentine’s Day at Margot. I don’t remember what I ate, just the fight we had after. I slept on the couch. We broke up six weeks later.

I couldn’t come back to Nashville after that. I was too sad, too scared to run into him with someone else on his arm. So, Nashville restaurants, I spurned you for years. I hope you see now that there really was no other way. I started spending all my weekends in Atlanta, soon with someone else, at new restaurants. I got a great job and took him to Bacchanalia to celebrate. I had white truffles shaved on my risotto. The meal was $400 and worth every penny I paid. But it didn’t last, the job or the man.

I moved to Mississippi, and I had a standing date with City Grocery, cheap white wine and pimiento cheese on the balcony with all the writers, talking about New Orleans restaurants with my favorite lawyer. Then I was laid off again. The poet I briefly dated started stalking me. I moved to Knoxville.

My first week in Knoxville, I went to a place advertised as a wine bar. I ordered a cheese plate. It was cubes of cheese, with Pepperidge Farm crackers. The wine was overpriced and sour. I went home and cried. Knoxville never felt right. I loved my job, and I loved the friends I soon made, but I didn’t love the city. And I hated the restaurants. Nothing compared to Atlanta. Nothing even compared to Oxford. And the wine lists — laughable, almost all.

One place had a great wine list but inconsistent food. It closed. Another place, a tiny cafe, served amazing food but only three nights a week. It closed too. A very bad relationship ended badly, and I wanted to do anything, everything to get out of town.

That’s when I finally returned to you, dearest Nashville restaurants. I needed saving, and you saved me, taking me back without even batting an eye. Soon I would make up excuses to work in Nashville for the day, just to go out to eat after. There was another guy then, of course there was. Dinner at City House and Holland House. Pizza at DeSano. Drinks at 308 and Patterson House. Brunch at Marché, always Marché. And one magical night, The Catbird Seat. The congee with chicken skin was everything.

He took me to Rolf and Daughters for my birthday. That was the last time we saw each other, although at the time I didn’t know it would be. We had talked about going to Charleston and eating our way through the city that summer; he took his new girlfriend instead.

But I kept coming back to you. I knew I couldn’t give you up, not for my own sanity. I made it to my Husk reservation, even though I had the flu and could barely stomach eating. I dawdled at the bar at Josephine, picking at an appetizer, not willing to drive back to the city I didn’t want to live in. Even as the restaurant scene slowly improved in Knoxville, I longed for you, your better wine lists and semi-professional servers and even your ridiculous lines.

Now, finally, after all these years of yearning, I have you — more of you than I could have ever expected when the crush first took hold, and my love grows stronger every day. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us.

Love,

Cari Wade Gervin

Dear Intersection of Old Hickory Boulevard and Nolensville Pike,

I’ll just say it: I think you’re unfairly judged. As the last stop before exiting Davidson County, sandwiched between the hills of Brentwood and the diversity of Antioch, you do kind of look like a downtrodden, suburban mess: a wide intersection full of gray exhaust. But your four corners hold basically anything and everything I could need in my everyday life.

Sure, I’ll look wistfully at the walkability of 12South and the undeniable hipness of Cleveland Park — America’s nicest Cleveland — but my eyes eventually turn south to your mass of strip-mall treasures. You have me covered if I need a baby bottle or a beer bottle; if I have a fever or a broken toilet; if I want to paint the house or dress like a cowboy; or most simply and notably, if I’m just really hungry.

Hidden along your intersection is the new Prince’s Hot Chicken location and my go-to favorite Korean-and-Japanese-combo restaurant Midori. Want to talk about Mexican food? Two of the best Mexican restaurants in the city face off across Nolensville Pike: Fogatas and La Terraza — both of which have won Best of Nashville accolades. You’ve got decent wings (Wing Basket), Latin flavor and local beer at Subculture, hot pho at Sriracha (which is a steal at $6!) — the list goes on. Your businesses might not be in cute houses, and they may not be filled with reclaimed barn wood, but if my car breaks down and I’m stranded at any intersection in Nashville, I’d choose you. And not just because of the multiple auto shops on your streets.

Your pal,

Elizabeth Jones

Dear Opry Mills Mall,

I write this letter to you from within you, like Jonah to his whale. But unlike Jonah, I am not blanketed in darkness and silence, protected from the turbulent seas by my blubbery home. Your food court is the sea, a constant barrage of light and conflicting smells and the low hum of collective conversation regularly pierced by the high-pitched wails of little humans.

I spend a lot of time alone with a book — or with the same two or three people — so your chaos is surprisingly comforting. Every type of person who can be found in Nashville can be found within your walls, and so coming here is like a quick inhalation of my weekly (OK, monthly) dose of human contact.

Of all the ways I could mentally categorize my fellow Mills dwellers, I find myself relying on happiness as the primary organizing factor. Some families are obviously happy here — a dad holding his kid’s hand, a couple smiling at each other over an inside joke. Others are obviously unhappy — audibly arguing or screaming at a child who wants to fill a plastic bag with candy from the center-aisle kiosk.

But where it gets interesting is somewhere in the middle, where it’s not quite clear if my fellow Opry Mills denizen is happy or sad. The middle-aged man asleep in a chair — is that a peaceful sleep or an agitated one? That couple silently chewing their Panda Express — are they in a fight, have they been together so long they have nothing left to say, or are they just solemnly considering the forthcoming physical consequences of their three pounds of moo shu pork?

Whatever it is, I love it, and I love you, Opry Mills Mall.

Yours,

Stephen Elliott

Dear Nashville’s DIY Scene,

A couple weeks back, Oakland, Calif., rock ’n’ roll outfit Shannon and the Clams and locals Faux Ferocious played a last-minute show at East Nashville art space Soft Junk. Shannon and the Clams had been in town tracking an album with Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach — he was at the show, by the way — and so, hey, why not test out new material with a low-pressure, minimal-promotion gig in an intimate venue?Toward the end of the Clams’ set, frontwoman Shannon Shaw told the full house at Soft Junk to take care of do-it-yourself music and art spaces like this one — they’re precious, she told us. And she would know better than most. In December, a devastating fire at Oakland DIY space Ghost Ship claimed the lives of 36 people, among them artists and musicians ranging in age from 17 to 61. In the wake of the fire, cities across the country cracked down on spaces like Ghost Ship. Nashville was among them, with the Metro fire marshal’s office contacting and shutting down shows at local DIY spots like Drkmttr and The Glass Menage. Now the future of Nashville’s DIY spaces is uncertain.

From an outsider’s perspective, shutting down DIY spaces seems like an easy enough call. If an off-the-grid, unlicensed music space doesn’t have and can’t afford the sorts of safety precautions that above-board venues have, why run the risk? But for those of us who came of age attending and playing shows at places similar to Drkmttr and The Glass Menage — those of us who discovered art in those places, found communities where we fit in — it isn’t quite a black-and-white issue.

I’ll admit, while I’ve never felt psychologically, socially or emotionally unsafe or unwelcome at any of the countless house and DIY shows I’ve attended, a general sense of physical danger tends to be part of the bargain. A 2012 show featuring West Coast psych-rock luminaries Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall at now-defunct downtown warehouse space The Zombie Shop comes to mind. During one band’s set, a two-by-four propping a roll-up metal door aloft came dislodged, sending the heavy door downward to bonk a guy right in the top of the dome. I rushed over to prop the door back open with a couple of fellow showgoers — a member of The Raconteurs and a Grimey’s employee, as it happens — until the two-by-four could be repositioned.

But these places I discovered in my youth — and the ones that struggle to survive now — were and are more than rickety old industrial spaces and half-dilapidated rentals in run-down neighborhoods. They’re hotbeds of cultural diversity and rock ’n’ roll freedom. The bands I’ve seen in basements, warehouses and repurposed bedrooms across Davidson County over the past decade-and-a-half are bands you can now see performing on late-night network television and on Bonnaroo’s tent stages — bands like Lambchop, JEFF the Brotherhood, Diarrhea Planet and Bully, many of whom honed their chops and played some of the most high-energy, sweat-drenched shows of their careers in 12-by-15-foot rooms for 50 ecstatic kids.

These were and are places with names like The Other Basement, Pussy Palace, Mt. Swag, Queen Ave, Exponent Manor, Glenn Danzig’s House and Little Hamilton — not to mention now-shuttered house-show spots in Murfreesboro, among them Wolf Castle, The Brothel, House House, Trash Mountain and Apollo House. They’re places booked and run by resourceful, open-minded, compassionate and creative young people, and they’re where I first learned to observe and report shows as a journalist and critic. They’re also where I learned to perform — the second real show I ever played was in the crowded basement of my buddy’s house on Cahal Avenue in East Nashville, back when that neighborhood was home to exactly one Krystal and exactly zero tall-and-skinnies.

What I’m lucky to have learned in these basements and bonus rooms — what many Nashvillians old and new still don’t seem to realize — is that the Music City ethos of ingenuity, talent and hard work isn’t confined to Music Row and Lower Broad, or even the many rock clubs peppered throughout the city. This is a scene that has launched careers and put Nashville in the international spotlight. It’s a scene that has given us both street cred and a stable of professionals who learned the hard way how to book shows and run sound, how to wrap cables and pay bands at the end of the night, how to write about and take photos of concerts, how to make a living by making art. It taught me how to listen. It taught me how to be inclusive and passionate.

Nashville owes more than it realizes to its DIY scene and the punk kids — and hip-hop kids, folk kids and even country kids — who make it run. If we dismiss it, we dismiss what makes Nashville special. I love this scene because I love this city.

Yours forever,

D. Patrick Rodgers

Dear Vanderbilt NICU Staff,

To be honest, you were the furthest people from my mind when my baby was pulled, weakly crying, from my stomach and quickly placed in your care. I didn’t worry about your hands, skillfully scanning his heart, or your response time when he needed more oxygen. We were at Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt is a good hospital. I knew you were smart. You’re doctors and nurses. You do this every day. And I knew my baby, with his broken heart, needed you.

What I didn’t know is how much I needed you. As the days went by, I, a 34-year-old woman, looked increasingly to doctors and nurses of Vanderbilt Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, meant to care for miniature humans. I needed you to patiently explain every medical decision you made, calling out the spelling of complicated medicines as I texted them to my family. I needed you to show me how to swiftly change a diaper amongst snakes of cords and how to turn my child’s head so it would be perfectly shaped. I needed you to listen to my questions and revise your decisions based solely on a mother’s intuition. I needed your bright smiles, your quick laughs and your propensity to dote over my son — reminding me that even though he was in the hospital, I should try to savor his every expression and new movement. I needed you to stop everything and say, “This baby — this baby is really cute,” and I needed to believe that you meant it.

Over the course of our 79-day stay at Vanderbilt, I came to love you and look forward to spending time with you. I loved you for delighting in my son’s small successes and softening the blow of his hard setbacks, and for your cheesy exclamations, like, “Wooo doggy,” which sent me into a fit of giggles on an otherwise stressful day. I loved you for never sugarcoating our situation, but still managing to inspire smiles despite my depression.

I will never be able to divorce memories of my son from my memories of you: swaddling him, puzzling over his ventilator, soothing him during his tantrums and desperately trying to turn his mobile on before all hell broke loose. And when it was over and we knew he wouldn’t make it — when my world permanently dimmed — I saw in your tear-filled eyes that your world dimmed, too. And I will always love you for loving my son, from his first breath to his very last.

Forever,

Elizabeth Jones

Dear Birds of Nashville,

I have to confess that despite all I’ve read about the value of experiencing nature, I always hated the outdoors. As a kid, when my parents dragged me on Western camping vacations, I’d complain plangently about missing my favorite sitcoms, and I’d pack a stack of library books that I hoped would divert me enough to block out the sussurating sounds of the forest, the sharp glint of mountain sunlight and the attractive-but-alienating scent of Colorado pines.

But life is strange: As a young adult, free to choose my own activities, I became a traitor to my own anti-outdoors cause — I got caught up in the embarrassingly unhip enthusiasm known as birding. It started when I spotted a small, perplexing bird rummaging in the leaves outside my Sylvan Park apartment. Somehow I couldn’t identify this chipper little neighbor — it wasn’t any of the obvious species. With research I learned it was the relatively common but quirkily named “rufous-sided towhee.” Suddenly, I was hooked, hoofing it around Radnor Lake and anywhere I might see an exquisite little unfamiliar bird.

I moved away from Nashville for a while, studying the waterfowl of Washington, D.C., and the gorgeous warbler migrations of urban Chicago. Now back in Nashville, I’m deeply grateful that we are a city of woodlands, marshes, streams and lakes, where untold numbers of birds — some common, some rare, but who cares — live their lives. I’m grateful because birds are the small shimmer of wildness that caught my eye and helped me see the forests and smell the trees. Thanks, birds of Warner Parks, Shelby Bottoms and my backyard, the bald eagles of Bells Bend, the black-and-white loons stopping to whoop and rest in Radnor Lake, and whatever captivating passerine might pass by next.

Affectionately yours,

Dana Kopp Franklin

Dear Sugar-Free Chocolate-Covered Nuts at The Peanut Shop,

Sometimes love is complicated, sugar-free chocolate-covered nuts at The Peanut Shop in the Arcade. And I’m sorry, but I’m writing you to say that while I love and adore your low price and the cute little vintage peanut dancing on the bag you come in, I must admit I’m settling for you. I know you probably wanted something as simple as not being second, but that I cannot promise you.

In truth, I wanted something more rich. I wanted something with actual, real sugar in it. I wanted something decadent, something that, unfortunately, my diabetes doesn’t allow me to savor.

Just above you on the shelf, in a separate little cubby, there sits the real thing. I’ve watched the people in front of me order dark-chocolate-covered almonds and some of those sugar-coated lemon drops — I try to look away as they sample so I’m not tempted to leave you (and my prescribed diet) behind.

Even though I’d love to revel in the pleasure of the full-flavor goodness of a milk-chocolate-covered almond or peanut or walnut, you are good enough to make me forget what I wanted. A bagful of you and I’m no longer craving the delicious chocolate that got away. Just remember that even though I’m settling for you, I’m probably one of the only people buying you on a regular basis. Please don’t leave me, and I promise I won’t leave you.

Yours truly, at least until

 there’s a cure for diabetes,

Amanda Haggard

Hey, Ladies of Nashville.

What is uuuup? I fucking love you.

 Three years ago I moved to Nashville from my lifelong home of Seattle, leaving behind the land of weed delivery, gay marriage and socialist city council members for a new place in the middle of the Bible Belt. “Culture shock” doesn’t even begin to describe it.Sure, I have met some wonderful people, because Nashville is full of wonderful people, but I’ve never felt capital-H Home. Strangers ask me what church I go to and are confused when I say I don’t go at all. I’ve been told I’m too loud and too direct when I thought I was simply stating an opinion, and I’ve been made to feel foolish for wanting the world to be a safer, kinder place for everyone — especially women. Lately it’s been particularly difficult. The fact that a very unqualified man was elected president over an overwhelmingly qualified woman has had me longing for Seattle’s more progressive pastures.

But then I drove over the Korean War Veterans Memorial Bridge on Saturday, Jan. 21, on my way to Nashville’s Women’s March. Thousands of people — the majority of them women — were flooding into Cumberland Park, filling the parking lots surrounding Nissan Stadium and lining the 3,000-foot stretch of the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge. They were yelling, chanting and waving hilarious, smart and/or poignant signs. They were refusing to be ignored.

I knew there were like-minded people here. I knew Nashville is a blue dot in the red sea. But it wasn’t until I saw women come out in droves to support other women — women of color, trans women, immigrant women, women who aren’t old enough to vote and women who have been voting for the better part of a century — that I was finally able to understand just how many of us (of you!) there are out there.

I see you, women of Nashville. I hear you. I love you. Thank you for making me feel like I have a home again.

Yours in resistance,

Megan Seling