I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I spent my elementary and part of my junior high school years in a D.C. suburb. And then I spent my high school years in Minnesota. And then I spent my college years in Colorado. And then I spent some time living in China. And then I spent three years in Vermont before moving down to Nashville.
Abigail Washburn
When I first started playing the banjo and miraculously fell into a record deal in Nashville, TN, there was a period when I didn't go to China. It hurt. Like a pain in my gut... that pain you feel when you know it's time to connect with your parents or your God or your child or your past or your future... and you don't do it.
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.
Ace Young
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.
Adrienne C. Moore
Holland is to dance music what Nashville is to country.
Afrojack
I'd love to study in the U.S. I visited Vanderbilt in Nashville, and I've been told to check out Ole Miss. There are so many schools that I don't really know where to start. But I do love the U.S. and have met so many supportive and enthusiastic people here while I've been on tour. I could definitely live here!
Alexandra Adornetto
My favorite thing about Nashville is the parks.
Ann Patchett
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.
Anne Murray
I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and I saw - we talk about crumbling bridges - I saw one, concrete literally falling onto the underpass below, threatening auto traffic.
Anthony Foxx
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.
Ashley Monroe
I think every role you do prepares you for the next one. Of course, 'Nashville' has been, and will continue to be, a huge learning experience for me as an actor. It's something that I grew a lot doing.
Aubrey Peeples
I was born in Nashville, but my whole family is from East Texas, so I consider myself a dual citizen.
Aubrie Sellers
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.
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.
Ava DuVernay
There's going to be a point in time when I can go to a NHL game in Nashville with my grandkids. That's really special.
Barry Trotz
A nontraditional hockey market is turning into more of a traditional market. We're now a fabric of Nashville.
There are a couple things that I could be doing, maybe owning a coffee shop or work in construction, building houses back in Nashville or British Columbia. I've also thought about being a property owner which would give me income and allow me to fix and maintain those properties to keep me busy.
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.
Hopefully my time in Nashville has helped me. We've had a lot of different things happen to our hockey club, seen a lot of different situations and different types of clubs from an expansion team to a Stanley Cup playoff threat. I think any coach that's gone through those things, you become a better coach.
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 did enjoy Nashville a lot of the time, because I made really good friends who were really good songwriters, and they would be a joy to hang out with.
There was a period when I wrote in Nashville for Maverick and then Warner/Chappell, and it was interesting.
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.
I'm the 'Scandal'-'Nashville' kind of TV watcher.
One of my pet peeves about Nashville is that it tends to be copycatted. I don't want to do that. I've got to be different.
I moved to Nashville at 17 to make music, and since then I've put everything I have into doing it right.
I still consider myself working in Nashville. I visit Hollywood.
The only reason I wound up in Nashville and went to Belmont University is because that's where I needed to be.
In Nashville, if people don't like someone, they say, 'I don't really like him,' then add, 'bless his heart.' In Hollywood, they kind of leave that last part off.
A creative space is an important thing. There are so many studios that feel like doctor's offices in Nashville. I couldn't write there.
You have different stages in your career where you have different things to prove. And early on, like most people who move to Nashville, I wanted to prove that I belonged here, that I belonged in this format, that I had a love for it.
Being in Nashville was not me, and I needed to go home and reset before I got in over my head.
I've been asked a million times to move to Nashville, but I just can't seem to do it.
'I'm Sorry' was one of the first songs to come out of Nashville using strings.
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.
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.
In Nashville, everybody just wants to write the best songs. So it's a very inviting songwriting community.
I was writing and playing in California for 11 years before I moved to Nashville.
Mark Winchester has left the band. He's decided that he's tired of the road and just wants to concentrate on his career in Nashville. I don't blame him at all. He'll certainly be missed.
I'm from Clearwater, Florida, and I love Nashville so much I don't even really miss the beach.
I fell in love with Nashville and wrote with some of the best songwriters here.
I live in Nashville, and I don't know how many people there would call me country. I really started in punk and anti-folk, but one of the reasons I originally gravitated towards country music is because most of those songs only use three chords. That was the easiest place for me to start, but I'm always trying to expand what I do.
I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.
I get my gossip from 'Nashville' on ABC.
The only two shows I watch are 'Walking Dead' and 'Nashville,' but both just went off the air for a couple of months, so I feel like I have to be productive because I'm not sitting around waiting for the next episode of zombies or mainstream country music.
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.
Nashville, I think, for me, personally, would be where I want to live and work. L.A. is a whole other world and has a whole other vibe to it, so I would like to come out here for work for a couple of months, but L.A. is just not really my scene, per se.
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.
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.
