Nashville quotes
136 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"I learned some invaluable lessons in Nashville that apply to both farming and show business: Do not corner something you know is meaner than you; keep skunks of all kinds at a distance; if you forgive your enemies, it messes up their heads."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
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"My favorite place in the whole world is Nashville. Because it's my home, it's Music City. It's like, everybody there is so artistic and so creative, and nice! Everybody's really friendly."
"I definitely think that with music my favorite thing about Nashville is that it's a music hub that accepts and allows all genres to be present, and I think there's been a kind of fusing of genres lately that for me makes me really happy and excited."
"When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me."
"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."
"When I was growing up, Nashville was the place to go if you had songs to sell and thought you had talent and wanted to tour and be on Grand Ole Opry [radio show]. It was the big deal back in those days to play the Grand Ole Opry. And you could travel around the world saying, "Hi, I'm Willie from the Grand Ole Opry"."
"My absolute favorite meal in Nashville is sweet-potato pancakes at Pancake Pantry."
"My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them."
"I think I had the same notion most people have, which is it’s simply a town that percolates around country music. Though country-music history is deep and richly steeped throughout the city, this is a place that’s been expanding musically and culturally…People coming from Europe and Canada-there are all kinds of different cultures and different music being represented here. It continues to blossom."
"I had admired Waylon [ Jennings], but I never expected to meet him and get to know him. When I finally moved to Nashville years later, one night I went to a Harlan Howard Guitar Pull thing, and there was Waylon. He started talking about how much he loved my work and how great I was, and I couldn't even get a word in."
"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."
"Im Sorry was one of the first songs to come out of Nashville using strings."
"I could get drunk and run around Nashville naked. But I won't because I want to set a good example for my fans. I think they deserve to have a role model."
"Nashville is my home, and the reason why I get to do what I love."
"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."
"I always had a hard time with Nashville. I reluctantly live there. I've mellowed, and it's improved some, in the fact it has more immigrants. There's some real Mexicans there, some folks from India, some of this and that. I'm not satisfied at all with living there. It's a dilemma for me."
"I'm playing a D-28 Martin that I've had about 20 years or so. I've got a '51 Martin and I thought I shouldn't be taking this on the road. So I went down to Gruhn Guitars in Nashville and kind of traded around and ended up with this one. This guitar sounded pretty good as new guitar."
"I was always drawn to the roots music, bluegrass, blues, early rock - Sun Records, Elvis [Presley]. And I still love that music to this day. Memphis never gets the credit. It's much more musically rich than Nashville ever will be. Nashville manufactured that hokey-hillbilly image way back."
"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."
"My contract with mercury PolyGram Nashville was about to expire. And I never had really been happy. The company, the record company, just didn't put any promotion behind me. I think one album, maybe the last one I did, they pressed 500 copies. And I was just disgusted with it. And about that time that I got to feeling that way, Lou Robin, my manager, came to me and talked to me about a man called Rick Rubin that he had been talking to that wanted me to sign with his record company."
"I think in the world of rock music or whatever it's called - anything outside of Nashville - there's a lot more freedom within that industry to do whatever you want to do."
