by Chris Badeker
As soon as we crossed the threshold of our apartment door, we dropped our luggage on the carpet, stared around our living room. Then we started crying. It could have been exhaustion after the twelve hour drive from Nashville back to Maryland. It could have been a cathartic release after wrapping up a month of intense recording sessions. But it wasn’t either of those things. I stood amongst the baggage and guitar cases holding my wife and not knowing what to say. Whether it was spoken or not, we both were thinking the same thing.
“We don’t fit here anymore”
The clarity of knowing where you want to be is both a wonderful and terrible thing. We had wrestled for years with where we saw ourselves living long term. Nashville had certainly been on our radar, but in our mind’s eye there was a brick wall around it. Ceding that we wanted to live there meant contending with the many voices that sought to check us at the door.
“So you think you’re a good enough songwriter to warrant moving to Nashville?”
“Does Nashville really need one more songwriter?”
“Nobody wants you to move there, it’s already so crowded”
“So you're trying to get discovered or something?”
The truth was, we wanted to move to Nashville to be a part of what all of the artists we admired were doing. Living, creating, and working in community. Sharing in little victories and keeping each other’s heads above water when need be. Spending a month there amongst creatives, writers, musicians, and poets had shown us a glimpse of how things could be. If that meant becoming a “small fish in a big ocean”, as many at home had put it, that was fine by me. Being a small fish in a big ocean beats feeling like a fish on dry land any day of the week.
In the interim between admitting that we desperately wanted to move and actually moving (a span of two years), we tried to identify what aspects of our “idealized life in Nashville” we could actively incorporate into our current day to day. I didn’t want to spend the rest of our time in Maryland idolizing a lifestyle while simultaneously doing nothing to foster it at home. It was with this naive chutzpah that we sent out invites to a “Songwriter Night” to every songwriter we knew in the area.
The core idea was to give local songwriters a chance to gather and talk about what inspires them, commiserate in their shared struggles, and share the songs they’re working on. On the night of our first meeting, we set out a kettle of hot water, every tea bag we owned, and a bit of bottom shelf whiskey to make hot toddies. The only person who came was our friend May, who traveled the distance of one staircase between her apartment door and ours. They were never large, but our gatherings were beautiful opportunities to sit at the feet (sometimes literally) of other creators and give them a gift that had become increasingly rare, our attention. I don’t know if they made me a better artist, but they made me feel more interested, curious, and empathetic. A pleasant change from the usual “stressed, self-conscious, and jealous” that often served as my baseline in that season.
It was February of 2020 before we finally moved to Nashville, and within a month any thoughts I had of regularly gathering with other artists quickly went out the window. We got to town and then promptly locked down for the next year and half. Around the time Nashville was starting to re-open, the Rabbit Room was also in the midst of doing a grand opening for North Wind Manor, their newly built operations and event space. It was a joy to live so close to such a fantastic space, and before long my wife and I had attended everything from wine tastings, lectures, concerts, and art shows there. I assumed it would only be a matter of time before someone qualified was brought in to host the sort of songwriter meetups I had always imagined happened in Nashville every hour on the hour.
When I looked into whether there were plans to start such an event, I was told that the idea had long been a hope for the space, but that no one had been able to commit to leading it as of yet. I’m sure you can guess the ending to this story. I have very little memory of how the discussion went, but by the end of the day, I was planning a season’s worth of gatherings for local songwriters.
We’re now in our third season of meeting at North Wind Manor and it has become a highlight of my week to sit and talk with so many fantastically creative minds. Like the gatherings we hosted back in Maryland, there are chances to share music we’re working on and get much needed feedback. Equally importantly, there’s a chance to sit amongst other artists who are at different points in their journey and find common ground. We get to discover that the things we struggle with in our art are the things our neighbor struggles with too. It seems counterintuitive, but for as much as artists want to feel unique in regards to our creativity, we also want to feel ordinary in regards to our imperfections. And so in addition to sharing our music, we spend time normalizing the highs and lows that come with the territory.
I believe in gatherings like this because I think that at the end of the day, our life as an artist will be more defined by the community we surround ourselves with than by the quality of our musicianship. Don’t hear me wrong, I think pursuing excellence and mastering a craft is a wonderful use of time. I also think there are a lot of lonely singers out there who would happily trade their left eyebrow just to sit with another human being who knows how it feels. Ironically, it’s the sitting and listening part that ends up making us better musicians in the process.
Photo by Daniil Zameshaev on Unsplash