Top 222 Nashville Quotes

That’s what I love about Nashville and the music community – seeing kids around acoustic music and bluegrass picking parties is the best.

I knew what I wanted to be, but I didn’t know exactly how to get there. I thought you move to Nashville, you sing downtown, and someone discovers you, and you become a country music star. I had no idea.

Country artists, I met a lot of them when I was five, six years old. I had an uncle who was a country and western singer and I met Lefty Frizzell when I was five or six years old in those shows that would come through Toronto from Nashville.

If I got dropped tomorrow or every single I released from now on tanked, I’d be devastated, but I’d also still be doing this. I’d still be writing songs. I’d still be recording them. I was doing that for four years in Nashville. This is just on a larger stage.

With ‘Sierra,’ this mean girl had all these kids bullying me – and I wrote the first verse and chorus the night before Tae and I came to Nashville.

Everyone has their own path in life, no matter if it’s being a celebrity or a singer. Quite frankly, I didn’t move to Nashville and tell myself I wanted to be a singer because I wanted to be a celebrity or I wanted to be somebody that people admired. I wasn’t about that. I just loved music.

To all my people back in Nashville who have been there from the start, you put your faith in me. You were there for the long haul.

I’m a huge Robert Altman fan and don’t take issue with his filmmaking, as eccentric as it is. But I just think ‘Nashville’ was a world he didn’t know.

I don’t think any of us ever trusted Nashville. When you’re in that town you know everybody is talking about everybody else. Everybody is wishing for the other guy to fail.

I’ll tell you, Nashville ruined country music.

I was not ready fresh out of high school to hit the streets of Nashville.

I didn’t move to Nashville with any inkling or dreams of getting a record deal. I didn’t have those stars in my eyes. I just wanted to take a break, relax, and figure out songwriting.

The Nashville Network, that’s all I would watch as a kid.

I would say growing up in Nashville has been a huge influence in my music. Growing up with my dad being a 2-time Grammy-winner, BMI songwriter of the year for five consecutive years in a row, and having the legacy he has is definitely a huge influence, too.

My father was in record promotion in Los Angeles. He worked for Mercury Records, Capitol Records, and RCA Records. My parents divorced when I was about 9. In 1978, my dad moved to Nashville and opened an independent record promotion company, Mike Borchetta Promotions.

I used to be sick of the backroads of Minnesota. I had to drive 30 miles to get home every day, take the schoolbus for two hours. But to drive through America and see the backroads, from Nashville to Memphis, Lovick to New Mexico, was incredible. It was probably the greatest trip of my life.

A lot of my music is very roots-oriented, and that’s country and soul. I’ve been in every roadhouse in the South, soaking in all of that… Nashville is like a second home to me, and I’m just gravitating toward the songs.

I didn’t really know you could make a living in songwriting. I was just very fortunate to have the opportunity to play a few songs for a guy there named Jimmy Ritchey. Through that meeting, I met another couple guys and ended up getting a publishing deal in Nashville.

‘I’m Sorry’ was one of the first songs to come out of Nashville using strings.

I’ve been asked a million times to move to Nashville, but I just can’t seem to do it.

Be in Nashville if you want to be in country music, because everybody that can help you is here.

I like this town, it’s really great. They’ve put me in The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. This town is about music. It’s about the kind of music I like.

My route is a little bit nontraditional. A lot of the people working in Nashville, they have a model. I don’t really fit into that.

I’m openly gay, and I’ve got a major label record deal in Nashville, and it happened when I was 42 years old. It’s not supposed to happen that way.

Growing up on Franklin Road in Nashville, I had everyone from Johnny Cash to Fats Domino swinging by my house to talk with my mom about my dad. So I had some pretty diverse influences, and I think that shows in my music.

When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that’s when it switched for me to songwriting. That’s when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.

When I went to Nashville, everyone was so nice. Even the TSA agents are nice there.

The great thing about David Poile and Nashville is they believe in the people that they hire and they stick with the people that they hire.

People don’t play music in New Orleans for the reasons they do in Nashville or L.A. – to become stars or to get rich – they play because they’ve got to. It’s in the streets, in their family, in their blood.

My decision to open my first restaurant in Nashville was born from my heart. From the moment I stepped foot in Music City, I have had a love affair with the people and burgeoning culinary scene.

I lived in Nashville for about five years. It was almost like me going to college for my craft. I immersed myself in the songwriting community there. They embraced me, and I made some real friends but also learned so much.

With ‘Pariah,’ at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, ‘No, I’m from Nashville.’

I knew I would always be an artist, but when you move to Nashville, this is a writer’s town. I moved here to focus on that and started pitching demos and immediately was asked to be an artist.

There is nothing else to do in Nashville except for write songs.

Honestly, with pop and rock and things, artists are from all over the place, so they’re kind of isolated. The city of Nashville helps create the camaraderie. Everyone moves there for the same reason.

I was a business major, but the more I played music and the more I got into songwriting, I realized this is what I loved, but I kept asking myself, ‘Is this what I’m supposed to do – move to Nashville?’

I was really impressed with the dining scenes and how amazing the culinary scene is in Nashville.

Country music is worldwide – it’s not just Nashville and Texas.

What I found about ‘Nashville’ coming in is it’s about these small performances. It can be on a big stage but detailed, small, heartfelt, real performances from musicians and singers. So if you try to do something bloated or showy, the directors dial us in and let us know.

I was writing and playing in California for 11 years before I moved to Nashville.

I was in Nashville quite a bit when I shot ‘Nashville,’ and I was in Los Angeles when I shot in ‘Supergirl’.

I want to go to Nashville and get cracking on this album.

There are so many people who would like to see me not make it in Nashville. But that’s good motivation.

Oh, Diane Nash deserves her own film. Diane Nash is a freedom fighter who is still alive and kicking. She was one of the leaders of the desegregation of Nashville, basically. She was a student at Fisk University who was one of the founding members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn’t become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.

If I’m not on stage, I’m a pilot. I like flying planes; I have a little plane back in Nashville.

L.A. was never me. Nashville is my home.

‘Nashville’ is a show that I personally truly loved, and to not have it back was a little bit of a heartbreak for me.

L.A.’s cool; I had a run with it to where it just pretty much wore me out. I love the weather and I have great friends there, great family, but I really cannot take a lot of the culture. Like Nashville, where everybody’s a songwriter, everybody out there is an actor.

When I pull into a city and I rent a car and it’s Nashville, or it’s London, or I’m driving in the taxi to the hotel, and on comes one of my songs, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, they’re still playing these songs on the radio.’ And you still feel tearful and very grateful that somebody still likes these songs that you made up.

When I moved to Nashville, I didn’t really let myself sonically explore, but things naturally got a little more poppy. And in L.A., even more so.

When I got into the Nashville scene, with the Ross Coppermans and Zach Kales and Jon Nites and Nicolle Galyons, all these people who have No. 1 hits with huge celebrities, they were able to show me creative ways and right ways of formulating songs.

When I started out, I was what they called corny. After a week in Nashville they were calling me hillbilly.

The power of network television is amazing. I’ve been performing for years but have been seen on only a few episodes of this show, and people spot me in public now all the time. They say, ‘Hey, aren’t you on ‘Nashville’?’ Most locals seem to really appreciate how authentic the show is.

The only reason I wound up in Nashville and went to Belmont University is because that’s where I needed to be.

I had been on the road for a long time and was not really getting anywhere. Bob Johnston, a friend of mine, had taken over Columbia in Nashville. He asked me if I wanted to come down. I did – thank God I did.

I get a lot of my songwriting done while driving around Nashville – sometimes it comes to me that way.

When I was 15, my mom and I packed everything up and moved to Nashville so I could pursue my dream in music.

Most of the time in Nashville, you’re so replaceable. Anybody can get another nice-looking guy to sing a country song.

I finished high school, moved to Nashville for college, and set out to break into the music business. Every night when I called home with news of my experiences, my mom and dad would encourage me to keep taking those small steps.

Nashville is the place where I first realized how impossible it is to look at someone and know what is inside them, what special something they possess.

I listen to a lot of Nashville local music, which, for the most part, is punk and grunge music but also alt-country stuff down here.

The rich diversity of the cuisine in Nashville is something that I’m incredibly proud of, and I think Tansuo will find a worthy place in Music City’s culinary landscape.

I get my gossip from ‘Nashville’ on ABC.

I can’t really change Nashville.

We want to support Nashville, support the community there and be a part of it.

Music leaves such a big impression. I always wondered, ‘Man, if I grew up in Nashville, would I be making Country records now?’ I honestly feel like Chicago had such a big impact on me.

I had no idea when I moved to Nashville people just were songwriters. I had no idea. So I guess I was selling myself as a singer when I first moved here. But then right after I first moved, I started writing a lot.

My stuff lives in Nashville but I live wherever my children are.

When I first came to Nashville, people hardly gave country music any respect. We lived in old cars and dirty hotels, and we ate when we could.

People come to Nashville where I live and they say, ‘What’s a great Southern restaurant?’ Well, you got to know the right grandmother, because there’s a lot of magic to good Southern cooking.

We’re having such a great time on ‘Nashville’ that building on the relationship seemed an obvious next step. Lionsgate is the perfect home for the kind of scripted television I want to produce and direct.

You know, when you’re an actor, you want to go to Hollywood. When you’re a musician, you want to go to Nashville.

If it hadn’t been for Johnny Cash, I’d probably have been a Nashville songwriter because that’s what I had done for almost five years.

I think about me and my dad taking a road trip from Phoenix to Nashville when I was 19. He’s no longer here with me, but I still drive that same 1994 Chevy truck. I never have bought a new car.

Nashville has a formula, and it works a lot of the time, but it wasn’t right for me. They’re afraid to step outside the box – even though, with me, my success came because I was outside of the box to begin with.

The first year I moved to Nashville, I started playing these songwriter nights with people like Nickel Creek, Duncan Sheik, and even Ryan Adams… That was the first place I really started playing music, and I had to really step up my game. Really quick. Or get kicked off the stage.

Nashville used to have more integrity than just looking at the bottom line.

I cut all my early records in Nashville, so I guess that makes me country. I call it country pop, but my love of the blues is in there, too.

It’s good to get out there and kind of move the body around a little bit, play some hockey, enjoy Nashville as a city and spend some time with family and friends.

In terms of ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Nashville,’ what attracted me to those, and ‘Friday Night Lights,’ for that matter, is that they felt like something innovative and something that we hadn’t seen before. As an actor, that’s exciting.

I was interviewed for a Grammy television show, and they asked me about Nashville, and I talked for three minutes and when I finished, I was teared up. The whole room was crying. Nashville has given me a home, where I never had a home before.

Broadway is a very different kind of place. It’s kind of like Nashville in that there’s a certain amount of people that are involved, and those people are what run it.

Nashville is my home, and the reason why I get to do what I love.

Steve Earle had a mainstream career. Dwight Yoakam had a mainstream career. Willie Nelson did. But they always made good music, they always stuck to who they were. They weren’t relying on radio like a lot of people are in Nashville.

Our creative communities in Nashville, in L.A. and New York, and in Austin, those are communities you want to see stay viable.

Being a guitarist was scary, honestly, as a girl in Nashville. It just felt like no one was gonna ask me to be in a band and play guitar, like I never was gonna get asked to do that.

Only one thing is certain: every time I return to New York from Nashville, I walk down the streets with a silly grin, just smiling at everyone I see and, more often than not, receiving a suspicious glance in return… but honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way, y’all!

I like to sing. I write music. Country songs. You have to if you’re in Nashville. It’s part of the lease. You sign a lease that says, I will write country songs and pay my rent on time.

One of the magical things about Nashville is just how many incredibly talented people are here and the way they support each other.

Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It’s been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It’s a great town.

There’s nothing like Nashville for making records.

I came to Nashville to go to Belmont. I went to school to be a student.

Dylan’s relationship with Johnny Cash was the biggest influence on Nashville in my lifetime – they opened up country music.

I’ve definitely received a lot of support in Nashville; it’s a huge music town. I like country music. Like any genre I’m largely unfamiliar with, there are elements I really enjoy and elements that go over my head.

My absolute favorite meal in Nashville is sweet-potato pancakes at Pancake Pantry.

When I came to Nashville, my personal life went to hell.

My favorite thing about Nashville is the parks.

I grew up listening to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, so arriving in Nashville in the ’60s was really exciting for me.

Most of my friends in Nashville – almost all of them – seem to have had hits in the ’70s, either as artists or songwriters or producers.

I studied the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence in Nashville as a student. And I staged a sitting-in in the fall of 1959 and got arrested the first time in February 1960.

I like to sit and listen to conversations here in Nashville. Not in a weird, stalker-ish way. I wander around Tennessee and find myself in little bars just zoning in.

I’ve been writing songs all along, and since moving to Nashville in the late-’80s, I’d begun writing something like 15-20 songs a year, instead of the typical three or four in previous years.

The first time I remember going to Nashville was in 1971 back when ‘Snowbird’ was a hit and I performed at the Grand Ole Opry.

If you go in RCA A, you’ll realize that it’s not just a Nashville thing. It’s a studio that belongs to music.

It was just like a dream. I could have ended up with an album that’s not all that different from anything else coming out of Nashville. Mutt made the difference. He took these songs, my attitude, my creativity, and colored them in a way that is unique.

Every July, I look forward to taping a Christmas show – in July in Nashville. In 98-degree weather. I love it.

We’re trying to tell a very full story of ‘Nashville’ and these characters in Nashville, and I’m really hopeful that we’re going to be able to do something as innovative as ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Friday Night Lights.’ And I think so far, we’re on the right path for that.

The thing about Nashville that’s amazing is everyone plays… so you don’t meet up for a drink, you meet up for a pick. It’s an incredibly creative town, just bubbling with energy.

Nashville has a great creative atmosphere. It’s a small, close-knit music community that you can’t find anywhere else.

I was born in Nashville, Tenn., but I have lived in a number of places. In 1937, I moved to Baltimore, Md., where I attended junior high and high school. I lived there for five years before leaving for college.

I started writing rather late in the game. I was fascinated about the story about how Bob Dylan, for ‘Nashville Skyline,’ wrote between takes. So I’d try to sing new songs off the top of my head. I had rather less than spectacular success on that. But a lot of my songs were done that way.

A nontraditional hockey market is turning into more of a traditional market. We’re now a fabric of Nashville.

There are people I love in Nashville and would not want to go a day without talking to, but I want to see the world.

My dad is in the music business in Nashville. I was the third child born in my family, and there are three notes in a chord, so that’s how they came up with my name.

Nashville has gotten so big and too technical and too polished.

‘Band Played On’ is a good one. Barbara Orbison, who was Roy’s wife, was involved in publishing in Nashville because she oversaw Roy’s publishing, and she had a company in Nashville. She had a whole bunch of writers assembled, and they got together every day and wrote, and they write for everybody in Nashville.

When I got to Nashville, people started asking me about how I got into country music. I’d tell them I came from a place where people wore cowboy hats for a real reason.

When I left college, it broke my mom’s heart, but I knew I had to be in Nashville. I knew that was the place you had to be in to become a better songwriter, and that’s what I wanted to move there for and to ultimately get a record deal.

Nashville, there’s people that are ten times more talented than me, ten times better singer than me, song writer than me, but for some reason you get the ball, and now – and now you run with it. And you do the best you can.

I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that’s when I wrote ‘Kids.’

For my first restaurant, I wanted to do something very special and close to my heart. Nashville felt like the place.

I loved Nashville. I was amazed by the whole place.

If Hank Williams had lived any longer, his name would have been one of the most hated in the land. Nashville would have dug him deep.

I think it took me a while to convince Nashville that what I do is genuine and my heart’s in the right place, and I love country music.

I could easily make Nashville a permanent home.

There was a time when I was – after my very first record from Nashville, I thought I might not be one of those who actually really makes it, and I may end up back in Canada, just playing clubs. And that might – this might have just been it.

It’s easy to get squashed down in this business, for sure. Nashville can definitely train you to not get too excited.

The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn’t been any such thing.

I’ve always been in love with the States. When I was a kid, we would take these long summer holidays in Texas, Nashville, and all over. I fell in love with the people, the food, even the smell. You don’t necessarily get that in old Europe.

My oldest daughter got married, she had a wedding in Hawaii and a reception in Nashville, and in between I had a Cup date in Dauphin, Manitoba.

I was nobody in Nashville and I was thankful for that. I had to get by on my talent.

If you went to school in Nashville, you were aware of all those ’60s rockabilly people.

We’re not just going to take some songs from a focus group in Nashville where people are sitting around in a circle having appointments trying to write catchy songs so they can sell them to a band like us.

Texas was home. We went to Anchorage to get rich in 1959. Someone told us, ‘If you drive a nail, you could make $100 a day in construction work.’ We were hungry, and we stayed there for a year and a half. But I never did plan to stay there – the same with Nashville. I was gonna go up there and work, but Texas was home.

One of the greatest matches I ever saw was Jerry Lawler against Terry Funk in the Memphis Midsouth Coliseum, but there was Flair vs. Steamboat in Nashville back in ’89.

Going to Nashville to meet the in-laws was the first time when I’d been in America and not been seen as some sort of eccentric character with a cute accent.

I feel like, genre-wise, the walls are coming down in Nashville. There are so many writers who have moved to town from all walks of life. There’s this immense respect for country, but there are pop songwriters, R&B. Nashville has become sort of this go-to writing city for every genre.

I definitely felt the desire to, like – I definitely knew there was an elsewhere. I definitely knew that, like, if I were going to be free, I needed to be away from, kind of, like, Nashville and kind of get out of the South and get out of the country.

Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

Being on ‘Nashville’ and working with some incredible people like T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller – so many wonderful, incredible musicians that I’ve been blessed to play with and observe – that has continued to shape the process of arranging music, writing music.

Nashville’s been like my second home.

I don’t know that I could pick a better place to raise a family than Nashville.

I grew up in Maryland on the East Coast – you know, close to D.C. but sort of in the suburban, rural area – and Nashville felt very, very homey to me.

In the middle of Mississippi, so many kinds of music came, but it was Nashville and country music that pulled my heart.

I was a staff songwriter for Combine Music Publishing in Nashville for seven years. I’d sit around with a groups of friends with a Yamaha piano and a tape recorder and crank out songs.

I’m not a big country guy even though I’m from Nashville. I like some songs, but I wouldn’t turn on a country radio station or anything.

I moved to Nashville with the same kind of mindset that I had in L.A., and that is to make sure you don’t get outworked by anybody and make sure you’re always writing songs and take every opportunity to play that you can.

There’s a system in place in Nashville, and for a long time, I was trapped in this idea that the only way to do it was to come to town, get a record deal, and do it the way they say. And that system works. But it caters to a specific kind of artist, and I didn’t necessarily fit that mold.

We have been so pleased with the response to our unique schools in the Nashville area, and we are confident that other areas will embrace our concept, as well.

I dislike all those cookie-cutter Nashville songs. You know the ones: about tight jeans and pick-up trucks.

For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there’s such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it’s such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.

I live in Nashville, and I love to sing. When I’m on stage, I feel like a performer for sure. I know people are looking at me and taking pictures and singing along, and that part’s wonderful, but I do live in Nashville. I live the most boring life away from what you see me on camera doing.

I love the story of the guy coming to Nashville and then kind of getting set down and told, ‘This is how the town works,’ which, I’ve totally been there. But the coolest thing about ‘Out of Style’ is it’s a song within a song.

You don’t meet too many actors in Nashville.

After Nashville sushi and a long debate on Bob Dylan, we went into Woodland Studios at 10 pm that night for a look around, and jammed for 5 hours solid.

Even though there are incredible songs floating around Nashville, it’s important for me to have my voice heard.

You can’t be rolling into town with stars in your eyes. A lot of people get to Nashville and immediately start selling themselves: ‘Let’s go to lunch and talk about the business!’ Then you realize everyone is talented here.

I moved to Nashville at 17 to make music, and since then I’ve put everything I have into doing it right.

I think Nashville could use some better shopping!

I don’t know if Nashville will ever be ousted as the Music City. But I also think that here, over the last few years, Georgia has definitely kind of risen to the top as far as the crop of young artists coming out of this area that are kind of making waves, you know?

We were one of the hottest bands in Jersey, but I was burning up because I knew I’d never be a star in Newark. I knew the action was in Nashville and that’s where I wanted to be.

I didn’t want to be a solo Westlife – covers and ballads – and the reason I signed with Capitol Records was because they wanted me to write songs myself. It was pretty scary, but they put me in a studio in Nashville with some new songwriters, and the results were pretty good.

I wrote ‘Happy Man’ with a couple of boys of mine. I have been writing in Nashville for a long time. Of course I was writing songs back in Oklahoma when I was a kid.

I’ve just signed a contract to make records in Nashville. It won’t amount to much at first, but after a year or so, I will really be in the money.

When I went to Memphis and Mississippi and Nashville, I learnt the blues is a whole way of life. I don’t really have the blues, but I can appreciate the honesty and the simplicity of it.

I have a great team in Nashville that works so hard to organize my life and stay way ahead of the game. We’re just really open and have a lot of communication and dialogue about making it our goal to keep me home as much as possible – as little time away from the kids as possible.

When you look around right now, Nashville is kind of going through another changing of guard; you’re watching the Martina McBrides and the Faith Hills and all of them that have been the big stars for the last however many years, and the next generation is coming in: Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, those girls.

Whenever I’ve seen shows or films set here, they just don’t feel like the real Nashville to me.

I am a great admirer of Sen. Frist, who is a nationally known heart surgeon and well known in Nashville as a great family man who has dedicated his life to helping others and, in that regard, he has followed in his father’s footsteps.

I started playing guitar, like, when I was 17 or so, but where I’m from, you just don’t hear about people moving to Nashville and making it. It was such a foreign thing to me. I never knew music was an option for me.

When you go to Nashville and start co-writing, you start doing it as a job and the more you do it the better you get. You know if you build houses for 30 years you’re better than you were the day you started. You know the ins and outs, you know all the nuances.

If I needed to record, I’d head to the coast or Nashville, one or the other.

I was told ‘no’ a lot when I first got to Nashville, but I’m pretty stubborn! That’s one of my faults and qualities.

Ooooh, I love Nashville! It seems like everywhere you walk, there’s great music coming out of every wall.

As a family we love to come together, so I never want it to feel stuffy where someone feels like they can’t kick their feet up. That’s the Nashville gal in me.

I will write a verse or a story and bring it into a songwriting session, because that’s what’s big in Nashville – the collaborative part of songwriting.

Me and Luke are fraternity brothers. Luke Bryan was already in Nashville when I got to college. He had come back to his old fraternity house, which was my new fraternity house. We met there and just kinda stayed in touch.

I’m from Tullahoma, TN which is an hour south of Nashville, and I grew up and wanted to be like Garth Brooks, so I moved to Nashville when I was 18 to chase a dream.

When I was 22 years old, and I first got to Nashville, women or girls were objects. It was a conquest. My emptiness inside and the external manifestation of my ego was to somehow conquer women.

Nashville is a boys’ club of redneck conservative ideas. But they’re ready to embrace gay people. I never felt for one second that someone was judging me. Some people are like, ‘Oh, I love gay people’ in that ‘I have lots of black friends’ kind of way. It’s awkward, but you have to appreciate that they’re trying.

Bobby Bones is a young country DJ who does a widely syndicated morning show. He’s at his best with his BobbyCast, in which he talks to Nashville up-and-comers such as Kelsea Ballerini and Lauren Alaina. Guests are encouraged to relax on Bones’s couch and talk about anything they like.

There’s a song called ‘Live Blogging the Himmel Family Bris.’ I kind of went for it here in terms of – it was really fun to be explaining ritual circumcision in Nashville – a lot of brises are done in hospitals, but many are done in people’s homes, and there’s a lot of food, and a lot of leftovers.

It wasn’t until I became involved with ‘Nashville’ that I thought I had opportunities to record my music in a way that I would want to put it out into the world.

Over the years I’ve had more and more of an association with Nashville.

Don’t move to L.A to become an actress – you’ll just be a waitress. Don’t drive to Nashville to become a country music star – you’ll just end up playing empty honky-tonks at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

I went to Nashville when I was 10. Tried to get a record deal. Everybody was like, ‘You’re 10. It’s not gonna happen. Come back later.’

A lot of time, if you spend too much time in Nashville, songwriters get caught up in charts and numbers and the music business politics.

There’s a lot to learn in Nashville. This town is just filled with amazing, talented, smart people, so it’s been an honor to be part of that community and to have everyone open their arms wide to me.

We’ll settle in Nashville. I love it there. I’ve got lots of friends there now, I love the area.

Someone put us onto ‘Nashville’ which we loved. To start with anyway. It was trash but proper trash if you know what I mean.

Back in the early ’90s, I started going to Nashville to do a lot of co-writes. One of the first people I met there was Keith Follese. Keith and his wife Adrienne are both songwriters, and we wrote some songs together.

I was born in Nashville, but my whole family is from East Texas, so I consider myself a dual citizen.

Because I have homes in Nashville and in Los Angeles, I’ve found some pretty amazing places to shop in both cities.

Nashville has become sort of this go-to writing city for every genre.

The big stadiums get totally packed, and everyone knows the words, and it’s screaming young girls. I met a whole bunch of great Nashville musicians, and they accepted me in their community. Classic rock and country music go well together.

Every single day I wrote a song, I was hoping somebody like Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean or whoever would record the song. It’s tough to do because there are so many great songwriters in Nashville, and I was lucky enough to get some songs recorded before I got my record deal.

In Nashville, good guitar players are a dime a dozen.

There was a period of time when I first moved to Nashville, like the first couple of years, that I was just simply lost. I didn’t know who I was; I didn’t know really what I was doing here. I was meant to be a singer, but I just felt lost. That’s when I went on the search for my birth family.

Nashville has pushed me to improve constantly as few other places could, and I’m grateful for that.

The songwriting community in Nashville really is all about your talent. It’s not about your image, and you have to be humble. You have to be kind. You have to have zero ego when you walk into that writing room.

I live on eight acres out in the country in Nashville, and it gets creepy and foggy. It’s the best atmosphere to write songs.

One of the things I liked so much about the women artists I saw in Nashville was that they were appreciated for their music and their talent, not because they were wearing skimpy outfits and showing a lot of skin.

I’d been to Nashville a few times before, but never thought something like this would happen. It’s a dream to sign with Atlantic and Big Loud.

If you had told me when I was starting out that I would be coming down to Nashville, kind of weaving in and out of the country scene, I never would’ve thought that in a million years.

Nashville only thrives when talented people from out of town move here from somewhere else.

There’s been a lot of talk about Jack White wanting to work with me, and I’ve always admired him, and of course, he lives in Nashville, too.

There’s more women stars in Nashville all the time. They’re proving they can do the job the same as a man.

Nashville’s like any other hometown – after a while, it’s stifling.

My first album after ‘American Idol’ I did with Desmond – we paid for it together, and we literally were together working on it every day for a year and half, just writing. We wrote in New York, Nashville, L.A., Sweden – we wrote with some other amazing songwriters like Diane Warren, too.

Nashville was totally different than I ever dreamed. I had only seen the music business on television and been to a couple of concerts. I had no clue.

I see interracial couples all the time in Nashville. I’m a Jew in Nashville. I’m a gay person in Nashville. It’s a non-issue in most of the time. That’s a huge leap forward.

I could put in garage doors or work in McDonald’s but that’s it. So I figured I might as well play the Nashville game.

I still consider myself working in Nashville. I visit Hollywood.

I grew up in Nashville, born and raised. I’m a country girl, and I love country music. I had a dream I was going to be the first black female country music star, but then that wasn’t the case.

‘Nashville’ songs and country music have always been about storytelling and about the heart and confessionals. They’re monologues.

I can only say the first thing that pops into my mind is I remember, years ago, seeing kind of a has-been country singer working – when I first moved to Nashville – in a bar in a Holiday Inn.

The truth is, that’s what we moved to Nashville to do – to learn how to write hit songs. We weren’t necessarily trying to get on college radio. We’re trying for mass appeal.

People might get mad at my style or my delivery and say it’s not country. But the country music that brought me to Nashville? Man, I will always have that on a pedestal.

Several years ago, I was asked by a songwriter’s association to go to Nashville – I think it involved some kind of award – and be part of the showcase. It was myself and Stevie Winwood and Michael McDonald and then some country people that I didn’t know. The whole community was just so welcoming to me.

It’s nice coming to Nashville, and we have four-bedroom house and a dog, and we go swimming a lot. We get down here and spread out a lot, and I miss my sweet tea and my cornbread and my good southern cooking – but I’m down here eating pretty for two weeks and I’m ready to go back to New York City.

Being able to tour and experience all of the stuff that comes from touring, and then being able to come back to Nashville, it’s almost like therapy to be able to get into a session and talk about all of the things that I’m going through. It’s so much more real to me.