Nashville Scene 6-8-23

CITY LIMITS:

TECH COMPANIES

REMAKE NASHVILLE’S

MUSIC INDUSTRY

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CITY LIMITS:

CAMPAIGNS ABANDON

HOPE OF REFORMING

MAYORAL FORUM

PROCESS

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Fe S TIV A L F R E N Z Y

FOOD & DRINK: A WORLD OF FLAVORS AT NICO’S LOUNGE RESTAURANT AND BAR

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The who, what, where, when and why of this year’s Bonnaroo and CMA Fest

MOTYCKA

Bonnaroo Thursday .................................

Settle in on the Farm with hip-hop, rock, soul and lots more

BY HANNAH CRON

Bonnaroo Friday ......................................

The hip-hop undercard takes flight on Bonnaroo Day 2, and that’s not all

BY SEAN L. MALONEY

Bonnaroo Saturday .................................

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From rootsy rock and charming pop to full-on multimedia experiences and beyond, it’s a busy day in Manchester

BY SEAN L. MALONEY

Bonnaroo Sunday ....................................

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Wrap up your ’Roo weekend with DJs classic and contemporary, some of the best rock bands in the biz and more

BY HANNAH CRON

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CRITICS’ PICKS

Catie Turner, Mean Girls, Ernest Day, Duran Duran, Rina Sawayama and more

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FOOD AND DRINK

It’s a Long Story Werckmeister Harmonies, Trenque Lauquen and the glory of long cinema

BY JASON SHAWHAN

41

NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD 42

MARKETPLACE

Catalina Searches for ‘Paradise’ This Summer

Judge Rules Drag Ban

Unconstitutional, Halts Enforcement in Shelby County

First Bite: SS Gai and Sweeza Super Quesadilla

The Apocryphal Tale of Nashville’s Secret Racist Gold Caches

Nigerian Noshes

33 Nico’s Lounge Restaurant and Bar offers a world of flavors

BY ALIJAH POINDEXTER

At the Market: Maypop Farmstead 34 Maypop proprietor McCall offers CSA boxes, vends at the Amqui Station Farmers Market and more

BY KELSEY BEYELER

37

ART

Dark Entries

In her second monograph, photographer Kristine Potter reflects on the Southern Gothic landscape and the murder ballads that form its soundtrack

BY

LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

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BOOKS

Gratitude and Loss

Angela Tucker wants us to understand the complexities of adoption

BY MARIA BROWNING; CHAPTER16.ORG

• A new community is forming on a beautiful farm with woodlands and a stream in Burns, TN.

• Our Site Programming Workshop was a huge success!

• This neighborhood o ers private homes and a professionally managed farm.

• Join an Information Session, plan a site visit, or give us a call at 615.480.2786

PET OF THE WEEK!

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Call 615.352.1010 or visit nashvillehumane.org

Located at 213 Oceola Ave., Nashville, TN 37209

NASHVILLE FAIRGROUNDS SPEEDWAY

REVVING UP NASHVILLE’S FUTURE: WHY I BELIEVE THE RACETRACK RENOVATION SHOULD MOVE FORWARD

The long-awaited renovation of the historic Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway and NASCAR’s return to our vibrant city has seemed tantalizingly close for years. But new obstacles and opponents are emerging, threatening to derail this long-promised project now that progress finally appears within reach.

One obstacle, as recently reported by the Nashville Post, is new state legislation aimed to alter the Metro Charter’s language, reducing the number of Metro Council votes required for demolition and approval of renovation financing plans. By lowering the required 27 votes to 21, the legislation seeks to expedite the proposed multimillion-dollar racetrack investment and NASCAR’s return.

But this legislative move is seen by many as state intrusion into the local government’s decision-making process. Though the mayor has supported the speedway’s renovation, he appears to prefer it not be accompanied by legislation that encroaches upon local governance or that detracts from local democracy.

Another and perhaps more surprising obstacle is a rising voice from the Nashville Soccer Club, whose concerns were expressed via a letter from team owner John Ingram to the members of the Metro Council. Nashville SC is a valued member of our sporting landscape and has helped elevate Nashville as a premiere sporting destination, and the organization’s concerns deserve consideration. The prospect of having these two large stadiums side by side raises valid questions about the economic and operational impact on both venues. But it is crucial to remember that progress often requires navigating challenges and finding solutions that benefit all parties. And to be frank, the speedway has been here for well over a century. The Nashville Soccer Club built on its site with complete awareness of the speedway’s historic value and Nashville’s intention to maintain and improve the facilities.

I thought Jerry Caldwell, the president and general manager of Bristol Motor Speedway, handled his response letter to Vice Mayor Jim Shulman well. Caldwell wrote that he was glad to see “protecting taxpayers” mentioned in Ingram’s letter, because “the Bristol partnership provides immediate and material financial relief for taxpayers by shifting $40 million of legally necessary capital improvement obligations to Bristol Motor Speedway and away from Nashville taxpayers.” As for concerns regarding “increased programming,” the “Bristol partnership will not increase the current schedule of 10 motorsports event weekends each year. NASCAR Cup races are planned for only one weekend every other year — once every 730 days.”

Through open dialogue and collaboration,

I believe any concerns can be addressed and a mutually beneficial outcome can be reached. While some may still hold reservations, let’s focus on the positive aspects of bringing the Nashville Speedway up to speed. (Pun intended.) From an economic perspective, the revitalization of the speedway would be a boon for the entire state. NASCAR races attract fans from hundreds of miles, which would inject significant revenue into local businesses, hotels and restaurants.

Further, according to Metro’s fact sheet on the Fairgrounds Speedway Proposal, the renovations will include rebuilding the grandstand to accommodate approximately 30,000 fans, adding new multipurpose event facilities, modernizing driver and spectator safety features, and installing state-ofthe-art sound absorption components to reduce auto racing sounds by 50 percent. If approved, the project will include a 30-year lease for Bristol Motor Speedway to manage and operate the speedway, funded by an up-front contribution of $17 million from the state of Tennessee and an additional $17 million from the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. The Metro Sports Authority will issue revenue bonds to finance the renovation, with revenue streams from rent payments, venue patron taxes, sponsorship agreements and event revenue.

The renovation of the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway represents an opportunity to preserve a piece of our city’s rich history. As the second-oldest operating motor speedway in the United States, it holds a special place in the hearts of racing enthusiasts. It has witnessed iconic moments and hosted legendary drivers like Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt, contributing to the fabric of Nashville’s heritage. By modernizing the facility, we not only honor this history but ensure that future generations can experience the thrill and excitement of racing.

Our racetrack renovation represents a pivotal moment in Nashville’s journey. The positive impact on our economy, the elevation of our city’s profile as a sports destination and the preservation of our history are compelling reasons to support this transformative project. Let’s overcome the obstacles, recognizing that progress requires determination and a collective vision for a thriving Nashville. We can reach the full potential of the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway and create a legacy that will be cherished by Nashvillians and race fans for generations.

Bill Freeman

Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post, and The News.

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In memory of Jim Ridley, editor 2009-2016

PHOTO: JUDE FERRARA

JUNE 8 | THE EXPLORERS CLUB

JUNE 15 | AIRSHOW

JUNE 22 | YATES Mc KENDREE

JUNE 29 | Mc KINLEY JAMES BAND

JULY 6 | END OF THE LINE – ALLMAN BROTHERS TRIBUTE

JULY 21 7 PM

Jazz Under the Stars

AUGUST 25, 26, 27 7 PM

Songwriters Under the Stars

Bluegrass Under the Stars

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway with AJ Lee & Blue Summit

Chris DeStefano, Jon Nite & Josh Osborne with the Music City Symphony

Bruce Munro (British), Whizz Pops On loan from Bruce Munro Studio. Photography by Mark Pickthall.

TECH COMPANIES REMAKE NASHVILLE’S MUSIC INDUSTRY

Riding the streaming wave, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon all set up local shops in recent years

BY ELI MOTYCKA

According to local lore, Nashville became Music City with a fated performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in front of Queen Victoria in 1873. Sometime in the 1920s and 1930s, the gravity moved downtown to the Grand Ole Opry — the Jubilee Singers kept singing, of course, but the industry has a penchant for what’s new, popular and, most of all, what’s making money.

Another few decades and the city’s country stars, labels, studios and executives built 16th and 17th avenues into Music Row. The blocks that once dominated Nashville’s music industry have in the past decade been tagged with historical markers. In 2014, artists, music-biz figures and a philanthropic real estate mogul came together to save RCA Studio A, where artists like The Highwomen, Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton and others have breathed new life into one of country’s most hallowed spaces. But a lurking sense of novelty on Music Row is also a sign that it has lost its industry pole position, no longer making markets or controlling the business of music. Instead, labels and publishers have to look across town to make sure there’s money coming back to Midtown.

Platforms rose to power over the 2010s as people stopped buying CDs and started streaming, making online markets the city’s new hitmakers. Over the past five years, streaming giants have established strong corporate presences in Nashville. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon all set up local shops here in recent years, favoring downtown and Wedgewood-Houston over Music Row. In May, Napster announced it would move its global headquarters to Nashville. The company that broke ground on music streaming in the early 2000s — before going bankrupt from the copyright backlash — plans to modernize its music services un-

FENTANYL PRESENTS INCREASED RISKS AT MUSIC FESTIVALS

need

BY KELSEY BEYELER

der new CEO Jon Vlassopulos.

Live Nation’s 2021 expansion at the corner of Chestnut Street and Fourth Avenue South is a physical reminder of the other way artists make money in the post-CD era: selling lots of tickets to lots of shows. The Nashville Sounds’ retired guitar-shaped scoreboard, now a decorative lawn ornament in Live Nation’s rear courtyard, is a campy statement piece for the billion-dollar company desperate to justify its new-money throne. Live Nation’s massive glass silos are a reminder that, in today’s music business, a few companies control who eats.

“They’re charting the future of music over there,” says Chris Farren, president of Combustion Music, an independent music publishing company on 18th Avenue South. “They are big-money companies with deep pockets that can have a huge impact — good or bad — on how things go from here. Live Nation, Spotify and Apple alone are billiondollar companies that dwarf us over here.”

During the glory days of physical media, one hit song could sell an album. When a unit sold for $10 or $16, the money was spread around. Farren refers to the 1980s and 1990s as a “Golden Age” for Nashville labels and industry execs, when hit records could net tens of millions of dollars. A typical record deal gave 85 percent of revenue to the label and 15 percent to the artist.

Today, Spotify kicks back $3,180 in royalties for a song that gets a million streams. Apple pays $7,830 and YouTube pays $2,000 for the same number of listens. Based on artists’ and songwriters’ contracts with labels and publishers, that money gets split even further, with more going to whoever has the music rights (“masters”) and less for songwriters. For Combustion, surviving the 2010s meant adapting with the industry.

“You could get 10 times as much for owning a master than you could for just owning

Asking festivalgoers to abstain from drugs is like asking teens to abstain from sex: You can preach abstinence all day long, but some are still going to partake. Drug use has become increasingly dangerous, however, due to a rise in the synthetic opioid fentanyl being found in other drugs. This phenomenon has driven music festivals across the country to reckon with on-site drug use and consider more proactive harm reduction measures — though issues like liability and legislation still present barriers.

Used to decrease drug production costs and increase potency, fentanyl is sometimes added to a variety of drugs, including cocaine, heroin and counterfeit pills. Minuscule amounts can be lethal — as little as 2 milligrams. This phenomenon has led opioid-related overdose deaths to increase significantly in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2021, more than 70,000 people died in

the song, so we leaned into the shift,” Farren tells the Scene. “We started doing more recording and trying to cut better deals with an artist than labels could. We never had leverage with big labels before. Now we do.”

Streaming cut out high-margin CDs, but it also democratized distribution. Printing thousands or millions of CDs used to be pricey bets by labels like Sony and Warner Music Group that could afford to spend a lot of money up front. Now anyone can put music on a platform. The challenge has become how to drive listens — a combination of radio play, media exposure (specifically social media) and getting featured on platforms. Curated playlists like Spotify’s Hot Country and RapCaviar connect huge followings to new songs and artists. They’re also gatekeepers, deciding who gets listens and who gets paid. They make money either way.

“Streaming has just decimated the industry,” says Tristen Gaspaderek, a local artist who worked as a full-time musician from 2008 to 2018. Her songs have millions of listens on Spotify, but that alone doesn’t support a modest living in Nashville. “I wouldn’t even call it an industry anymore when middle-class musicians are on food stamps. After a while,

the U.S. due to overdosing on synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Recently, authorities have also been alerting the public to the increasing presence of xylazine, an animal sedative, being mixed with opioids. Fentanyl overdoses can be reversed with naloxone, commonly known by one of its brand names, Narcan, if it can be administered in time. Xylazine-reversal drugs do not yet exist, however, and its presence can diminish the effects of naloxone — though naloxone may still help if the xylazine is mixed with opioids.

One attendee has died due to drug overdose at each of the past two iterations of Bonnaroo, in 2019 and 2022. (Bonnaroo was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID and severe weather concerns, respectively.) An autopsy showed that one of these deaths was fentanyl-related. While Bonnaroo’s medical services are supplied with overdose-reversing drugs, they’re also leaning on nonprofit This Must Be the Place to distribute naloxone to festivalgoers

I started to look around and see other people with health care, other people buying houses, things that were impossible for me as a musician. I don’t think anybody besides the really popular musicians are making a living.”

As streaming gained ground, Tristen started diversifying her skills as an artist: recording, marketing, publicity, videography — anything that would cut into her already paltry revenue happened in-house. It’s an age of mass creation, she says, all subject to a vast power imbalance. She points to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers as a path forward for artists and a glimmer of hope that creative output might be economically viable at some point in the future. She also mentions public funding for musicians, a model being rolled out by the European Union.

“On other platforms, I pay for content,” says Tristen. “I pay for an audiobook. But Spotify opened the floodgates. Live fees have been the same for 30 years. We have to purchase records wholesale from our label, and most people aren’t buying them anymore. We need to organize, and we need to be going on strike.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

and educate them on how to administer it. This is TMBTP’s second year appearing at festivals. Last year, they aimed to distribute 10,000 doses of naloxone. They surpassed that threshold, and this year they’re hoping to triple the number distributed, at more than 50 events.

Despite the fact that the fentanyl epidemic has been raging for years, increased access to and acknowledgment of life-saving naloxone has come along only recently.

“We pitched every festival that we could think of, and there was some serious trepidation from the promoters, and for every yes we received, there were countless no’s,” TMBTP co-founders Ingela Travers-Hayward and William Perry tell the Scene via email. “After the success of last year, we noticed a major shift in the response coming into 2023. …There are now other organizations who are doing similar activations at other festivals, and this is incredibly encouraging.”

Even with more widespread harm reduction efforts, barriers still exist — largely in the form of access to drug testing strips. While Narcan is more widely available at Bonnaroo, testing strips are not. Grassroots organizations like the Bunk Police distribute test strips at festivals, but they have been removed from Bonnaroo and other festivals before. These tests could be another proactive step in preventing overdoses, but their legality varies from state to state. Tennessee lawmakers decriminalized synthetic opioid testing kits just last year; Bonnaroo organizers confirm that the festival will not provide them.

“There is still quite a bit of [legislation] that would render the distribution of tests fully illegal, and to ignore that would hinder our ability to enter the spaces that we are grateful to be able to provide people with naloxone within,” say TraversHayward and Perry. “We hope, and advocate for, future national legislation that would clear the way for us to distribute test strips, but currently it just doesn’t exist.”

Though there are still gains yet to be made, the increased focus on this matter is a step in the right direction. Perry and Travers-Hayward tell the Scene that some festivalgoers are starting to expect “Narcan tents” at these kinds of events.

“A big part of our training is making sure that people understand that carrying this around, no matter their own personal level of substance use, is a way of saying, ‘I care about this, I want to do my part to curb the overdose epidemic, and I’m willing to step in should the moment call for it!’” say Travers-Hayward and Perry.

If you’re attending Bonnaroo this year, be cautious of any substances you’re taking, stay cool and hydrated, and look out for one another. While you’re at it, find TMBTP’s tent. There you can learn about and receive a potentially life-saving dose of naloxone, and talk to some good folks who understand the weight of this epidemic.

Travers-Hayward and Perry share an anecdote from a festival they worked earlier this year in Atlanta, where a young woman approached TMBTP’s booth and picked up a naloxone device. “I had to give this stuff to my brother three times,” she told them, before breaking down in tears. But the story has a happy ending: Travers-Hayward and Perry say the young woman’s brother soon joined her, sharing that he’d been clean for 18 months at that point.

“There we stood, on the grass, having a good cry,” say Travers-Hayward and Perry. “They were so grateful to be enjoying the festival and the music together, seeing some of their favorite bands. … And that, more than anything else that I could say, is how harm reduction works.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

FORUMS, FORUMS EVERYWHERE

BY STEVE CAVENDISH, NASHVILLE BANNER

This story is a partnership between the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Scene The Banner is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization focused on civic news and will launch later this year. For more information, visit NashvilleBanner.com.

Matt Wiltshire smiles. In the moments after a recent mayoral forum, as the candidates and staff mingle with the public, he looks at an opposing campaign staffer and says, “I think I gave you a bingo with Rev. Barnes.”

It’s the end of May, and the majority of the candidates to be Nashville’s next mayor have been on the forum circuit for a few months. As a kind of dark humor, one campaign staffer made a bingo card with each candidate’s go-to phrases on them.

For Wiltshire, it’s a reference to Bill Barnes, the man for whom Metro’s affordable housing fund is named. “Transit bought my house” is shorthand for Freddie O’Connell’s oft-told story of using the bus system to save for a down payment. “I’m not a politician” has been Jim Gingrich’s go-to for months. “Derecho” is Heidi Campbell’s favored type of storm; “taxes” are Alice Rol-

li’s favorite subject; Sharon Hurt’s phrase is “I’m a leader,” as her preferred metaphor of Nashville neighborhoods as mid-’90s Chicago Bulls players was too long to fit on the card.

The candidates know each other’s material so well because they hear it so often. Campaigning for mayor has become a kind of road show, an endless string of appearances in front of different civic groups, sometimes with more than one per day. So if one candidate didn’t say, “Nashville is at a crossroads,” in the morning, they might get a chance later.

Fatigue wouldn’t be a problem for the campaigns if all events were of a certain quality, multiple campaign managers tell the Banner on background. As one manager says, “All forums are not the same,” before detailing how one group invited the candidates to speak and just 12 people showed up. Another group asked questions for three hours in front of a crowd of 60 people. Many groups have also asked candidates to submit answers to lengthy questionnaires or even to meet in person

with a group’s leadership before appearing. Hours spent at a forum are often accompanied by hours spent preparing for the public appearance.

In early April, a group of mayoral campaign operatives got together and attempted to apply some standards to the ever-growing list of events. Many of them spoke to the Banner without attribution in exchange for their candor about the process.

“How many people are there?” says one campaign manager, detailing the list of questions for forum organizers. “What’s the venue? What’s the capacity? How many people are you planning to invite? How are you inviting them? What kind of outreach are you doing to make certain that the room is filled? Do you have a media partner? Will this be live broadcast or livestreamed in any way? Are you recording it? And if so, how will you share the recording later with the public?”

If this seems blunt, a manager’s job is to get as much exposure for their candidate as

As the mayoral election heads for the home stretch, weary campaigns have abandoned hope of reforming the forum process

CAMPAIGNING FOR MAYOR HAS BECOME A KIND OF ROAD SHOW, AN ENDLESS STRING OF APPEARANCES IN FRONT OF DIFFERENT CIVIC GROUPS, SOMETIMES WITH MORE THAN ONE PER DAY.

possible with limited resources (for most) and even more limited time. While several of these forums have been televised, most are not, and 10 minutes speaking during a two-hour forum is time that might be better spent elsewhere. One manager says the trade-off for an evening forum could be meet-and-greets with multiple sets of supporters, who might be energized to become volunteers or at least help spread the candidate’s message. And no candidate has enough hours in the day to fundraise.

At least five of the campaigns signed on to an attempt to enlist former Mayor Bill Purcell to be the face of the standards effort in April, but Purcell eventually begged off. Any unity among the campaigns fizzled out. One campaign manager hopes, in the future, some independent group could identify criteria to maximize the public’s ability to hear from candidates.

“Look, after the cycle I think you’d have no problem getting a handful of us on the record saying the problem with Metro elections is that we’re completely segmenting voters’ ability to actually hear from the candidates in a meaningful way,” says one campaign manager.

To wit, one campaign operative details a set of guidelines for an upcoming televised Fox 17 “debate” in which candidates would be given half a minute to respond to a question. “There’s no way you can have a substantive conversation on legitimate issues with 11 people on a stage and just 30 seconds to talk,” says the operative. Adds another manager, “That’s just for TV, that’s not real.”

One manager notes that a recent TV forum asked for one-word answers from the candidates.

“When you have content like that, it’s not meaningful, it makes light of this situation in front of voters, and diminishes the process,” the manager says. “Does it make people seem more human? It might. But when the question is, ‘In one word, describe Nashville,’ and five out of 11 or 13 candidates say ‘home,’ what have we learned? Nothing.”

The problem is, in some ways, structural. A couple of operatives pointed to the May 18 deadline for submitting signatures on qualifying petitions as creating artificial incentives in the race, for both the candidates and community groups wanting to engage.

“It doesn’t make sense for a lot of these organizations to do forums until May and you have this really condensed timeline,” says one manager. “But it also puts a priority and a preference towards anybody that can self-fund, or anybody that’s been in the race significantly longer. And particularly in a scenario where we find ourselves now where the current mayor [declined to run for reelection], we honestly have a real inflection point for our city.”

If you want to see candidates in person at a mayoral forum, a list can be found via nashvillescene.com — though you should note that at least three more forums were still being organized as of this writing.

Too many mayoral forums? What’s one more! The Nashville Scene, the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Post will co-host an event featuring all the top candidates in the race from 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 13, at The Reserve at Fat Bottom Brewery. The event is free to attend, but please RSVP.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

LONG COVID DIAGNOSES A FOCUS FOR LOCAL, NATIONAL RESEARCHERS

Demand for services remains steady at VUMC specialized clinic

BY HANNAH HERNER

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the conclusion of the federal COVID-19 public health emergency in mid-May. This change slightly limits the data reporting of COVID-19 cases, and insurance providers are no longer required to cover COVID-19 testing, though telehealth flexibilities and access to vaccine and treatments will remain.

The Department of Health and Human Services reports that COVID-19 deaths have declined by 95 percent since January 2021, and hospitalizations are down nearly 91 percent. Even so, people are still catching COVID-19, and according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around one-fifth of them will develop symptoms of long COVID.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Adult Post-Acute COVID Clinic is booked well into the summer. Sara Martin, assistant professor of medicine and one of the founders of the clinic, anticipates that demand will continue to rise.

“The data shows that there were not as many long COVID cases from Omicron,” Martin says, referencing the COVID variant that proliferated from late 2021 until subvariant BA.5 took over in summer 2022. “However, there’s still a high frequency of COVID cases weekly. In the end, we know that a certain percentage of those patients will likely go on to develop long COVID. We have not seen a slow-down in volume.”

The first federal study defining symptoms of long COVID (medically known as postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection) was also released in May.

The study measured long COVID symptoms in nearly 10,000 participants and found the following 12 to be most prevalent: post-exertional malaise (worsening of symptoms following even minor physical or mental exertion), fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, gastrointestinal issues, palpitations, changes in sexual desire or capacity, loss of or change in smell or taste, thirst, chronic cough, chest pain and abnormal movements.

Martin says physicians cannot yet identify long COVID through blood tests or other laboratory tests, so they rely on other clinical measurements. She adds that the most common symptoms seen at the VUMC long COVID clinic are included in the list, but shortness of breath is one frequent symptom that did not make the top 12.

“There are certain conditions and certain presentations that would still be consistent with long COVID that aren’t captured within this list, but it’s a nice start,” Martin says. “It’s a nice way to be able to at least have some baseline criteria to look for that are highly associated with long COVID, but it’s certainly not the end-all, be-all of a diagnosis at this time.”

The study was a part of the national RECOVER

initiative, in which VUMC is participating. VUMC is also looking into long COVID effects on the heart through an American Heart Association grant. Long COVID research has plenty of funding, Martin says, but she sees gaps in public health outreach. Long COVID can be considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act if it substantially limits one or more major life activities, though Martin often sees patients experience difficulty accessing federal disability benefits.

“The gap I see truly seems to be in how we manage people that have ongoing chronic disability and help them access resources that are needed,” she says.

For those who think they may have long COVID, Martin suggests starting with a primary care doctor.

“We know that vaccination reduces your risk of developing long COVID, for sure,” Martin says. “That has been studied and proven. We also know that in a certain percentage of patients, if you have not been vaccinated and have long COVID, actually getting vaccinated can improve your symptoms of long COVID.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Tennessee lawmakers’ attempt to ban certain drag performances continues to fail in court. Trumpappointed federal Judge Thomas Parker issued a ruling halting its enforcement in Shelby County last week and chastised the state legislature for a “troubling trend of abdicating their responsibilities in exercising ‘considered legislative judgment.’” In other words, the attempted ban targeting drag was so shoddy and confused that it can’t legally survive. Groups like the ACLU and the Tennessee Equality Project have vocally opposed the legislation since its inception. … State Rep. Bill Beck died Sunday after suffering a heart attack. Beck, 61, was a longtime Democratic state legislator who represented a big chunk of Davidson County that encompassed downtown, East Nashville and parts of Donelson and Madison. … A flurry of reporting on right-wing extremism in Nashville brought renewed focus on the Lewis Country Store, an alleged Nazi outpost on Ashland City Highway Jeff Tischauser, reporting for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, details the store’s upstairs fight club, where white supremacist groups appear to meet and train for physical violence. … As white supremacist groups formed, died, dissolved and merged in the late 19th century — much like they do today — a few key members, including KKK forefather Nathan Bedford Forrest, allegedly buried gold (but probably didn’t really) in East Nashville and Brentwood Scene contributor Betsy Phillips expounds on her history of Nashville’s white supremacy with an abridged version of the legend still alive among racist treasure hunters. … U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders joined state Rep. Justin Jones at Fisk University on June 3 for a rally calling for raising the federal minimum wage to $17 per hour. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. … Our series of interviews with current Metro Council at-large candidates continues with Marcia Masulla, a former staffer for Mayor John Cooper who is among the 21 people seeking five citywide seats. Stay tuned for more Q&As with candidates before early voting begins on July 14.

THIS WEEK ON OUR POLITICS BLOG:

SARA MARTIN

“IN THE END, WE KNOW THAT A CERTAIN PERCENTAGE OF THOSE PATIENTS WILL LIKELY GO ON TO DEVELOP LONG COVID. WE HAVE NOT SEEN A SLOW-DOWN IN VOLUME.”

— SARA MARTIN, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

WITNESS HISTORY

George Jones and Tammy Wynette sign autographs at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium during the first Fan Fair, April 1972.

FeSTIVAL FRENZY

Despite a pandemic and severe weather events derailing both Bonnaroo and CMA Fest in recent years, the two festivals — two of the biggest annual music events in the state — are back in full swing.

This week, CMA Fest will celebrate 50 years since its humble beginnings as Fan Fair, with a wide array of performances. Stars including Lainey Wilson, Miranda Lambert, Keith Urban, Eric Church and more, plus a vast undercard of up-andcoming talent, will perform at a number of venues in and around downtown Nashville. And just a few days later, the two-

The State of Country Music

Considering the contemporary landscape ahead of CMA Fest’s 50th anniversary celebration

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

DIVIDE UP HUMANITY by any demographic — race, age, gender identity, economic status — and you’re bound to find people with whom country music resonates. The most meaningful country has lots in common with meaningful music from other traditions: It’s full of wit and wisdom and celebrates being alive in good times and bad. Like any cultural expression, country music generally evolves along with the rest of culture, though reverence for country tradition sometimes means there’s significant griping about it.

Thousands of country music fans will flock to Nashville June 8 through 11 for the 50th anniversary edition of the CMA Music Festival, which began as Fan Fair in 1972 — inspired in part by Loretta Lynn’s love for her fans — and rebranded in 2004. Organizers canceled the fest in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19, but it returned with an estimated attendance of 80,000 people per day in 2022; it remains about the biggest gathering of fans there is. Between the in-person weekend, the annual TV special — which will feature performances filmed during the four nightly capstone shows at Nissan Stadium and will air on ABC July 19 — and the forthcoming feature-length documentary CMA Fest: 50 Years of Fan Fair that hits Hulu on July 5, the festival is still the biggest platform for artists.

Members of BIPOC communities and LGBTQ communities love country music just as deeply and richly as anyone else, and they are represented on the festival’s stages. The Country Proud showcase, spearheaded by

decades-strong Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival will kick off in Manchester, Tenn., with a lineup including hip-hop superstars, rock ’n’ roll icons, jam bands, pop outfits and a whole lot more. In this week’s cover package, we at the Scene dig into both festivals. We’ve got a look at the current state of country music, as well as a roundup of some of the hottest new artists to keep an eye out for at CMA Fest. We also dive into all the best action to catch at this year’s ’Roo, from headliners to local talent and beyond. Plus, don’t miss our favorite — the Scene’s annual Bonnaroo Bingo. Dive in and play along!

CMA Fest

June 8-11 at various venues

Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival

June 15-18 in Manchester, Tenn.

a surprise that Aldean is still welcome in the country mainstream and at the festival.

If this back-and-forth feels familiar, you’re paying attention. The long-established pattern is for grassroots organizations like Black Opry and RNBW to lead the way in making important changes, while big trade groups like CMA follow suit.

Nashville queer music organization RNBW, has a prominent spot on the fest’s undercard, bringing LGBTQ country musicians to the Hard Rock Stage near the riverfront on Friday from mid-morning to early afternoon. RNBW has also curated a Spotify playlist for CMA. Black Opry, which is building a support system for BIPOC country musicians whom the industry has historically ignored at best and abused at worst, is not curating a showcase this year as a follow-up to last year’s. But Black and brown artists continue to get more visible, valuable placement throughout CMA Fest.

We forget at our peril that music marketers in the early 20th century established two basic genres in order to capitalize on racism, and the echoes still reverberate. Progress remains slow in changing the power structure — within the CMA specifically and the country industry in general — to give people of color and queer people authority and equity in the genre over the long term. Something else we forget at our peril is that the CMA was originally established to uphold a purity standard for country music built on a racist foundation of wanting to counter the cultural influence of rock ’n’ roll.

Morgan Wallen, who has come to symbolize discussions about racism in country music since he was caught on camera using the N-word in early 2021, isn’t scheduled to play CMA Fest. After a period out of the limelight, he performed at the CMA Awards ceremony in November, and he’s been selling out arenas on the tour behind his new album One Thing at a Time. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see him as a late addition to the festival — if he had not recently canceled six weeks of his tour due to a vocal cord injury.

Superstars Miranda Lambert and Eric Church, who do have prime slots on the big stage at Nissan Stadium, worked with Wallen on his new LP. Their decision to collaborate with him when there still hasn’t been a real reckoning — with either his actions or the cultural issues underlying them — further cemented Wallen’s slow and steady reintegration into the mainstream.

Someone else who’ll appear at the stadium is Jason Aldean, who’s noted for enthusiastically supporting his wife’s transphobic horseshit. In a year when our state legislature went into overdrive attacking the rights of gay and trans people, it’s hardly

It’s also not impossible for large organizations to act when they recognize urgency. Within a few hours of a lawsuit filed by rising star Jimmie Allen’s former day-to-day manager, in which she accuses him of rape and a horrific pattern of abuse over 18 months, CMA Fest organizers announced that Allen would not be appearing at the festival.

And as country artists who are also part of marginalized communities have said, the need for a cultural shift is urgent. Trans artists like Mya Byrne are calling for visibility and financial equity, all while they have to carefully consider routing their tours to maintain their physical safety. As Black Opry’s Holly G pointed out in a January 2022 conversation with Scene contributor Brittney McKenna that continues to resonate, moving the needle on the systemic racism highlighted by Morgan Wallen doesn’t have all that much to do with him personally — it’s about addressing the way that his downplaying and avoiding criticism makes a safe space for racism. “[Wallen has] apologized for what he’s done,” Holly G said, “but at no point has he come out and said, ‘I don’t want these people at my concerts. I don’t want them to follow me. I don’t want them harassing Black people on social media.’”

If country music is supposed to be about family — making people feel loved, respected, proud of who we are — then as always, there’s plenty more work to be done. ■

The who, what, where, when and why of this year’s Bonnaroo and CMA Fest

ERIC CHURCH

MIRANDA LAMBERT

It’s How You Use It

Ten shows you don’t want to miss on the smaller stages at CMA Fest

WHILE THE MASSIVE NIGHTLY shows at Nissan Stadium are the big attraction for many of the thousands of fans headed to CMA Fest, you can see dozens and dozens of rising artists on smaller stages that dot the general Lower Broadway area. There are a couple more stages inside the Music City Center too, which you can access if you pick up a pass for Fan Fair X; there will also be a show at Ascend Amphitheater, and some folks on the rise will also play short sets on the Nissan Platform Stage inside the stadium between the megastars. Read on to learn more about 10 shows that caught our attention, along with scheduling details. Be sure to check the CMA Fest website and the CMA Connect app for the most up-to-date information.

Fancy Hagood

Thursday, June 8, 12:15 p.m. at Hard Rock Stage

Fancy Hagood was an absolute force of nature at folk-pop ace Joy Oladokun’s recent album release show, bringing a stellar band, a powerful voice and sincere storytelling about living life. In Hagood’s case, that happens to be life as a proud gay man with a partner he loves in Nashville, despite how uncomfortable our state legislature seems determined to make it. Listen out for songs from Hagood’s fantastic 2021 country debut Southern Curiosity, a forthcoming record produced by Brothers Osborne’s John Osborne, and maybe a rafter-raising rendition of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery” in the style of Bonnie Raitt. STEPHEN TRAGESER

RVSHVD

Thursday, June 8, 8:55 p.m. at Nissan Platform Stage; Sunday, 1:15 p.m. at Chevy Vibes Stage

RVSHVD (pronounced “Rashad”) has a lot more to say than your average country bro, and it comes from writing about what you know.

As a young person in Willacoochee, Ga., RVSHVD discovered a talent for improvising country melodies and lyrics over trap beats. He has polished that into a brand of country that wears its roots on its sleeve, with songs like “Hit Different” and his spin on Roddy Ricch’s “Ballin’” joyously flipping the script and demanding that Black music-

makers have their place in the country pantheon where they belong — all with humor and a sense of fun. RACHEL CHOLST

Brit Taylor

Friday, June 9, 10:15 a.m. at Maui Jim Reverb Stage

Brit Taylor’s 2020 album

Real Me chronicled her disillusionment with the mainstream country industry, her divorce, the death of her beloved dog, the repossession of her farm — and how she climbed her way out of it. She’s on the upswing with her new LP Kentucky Blue. Co-produced by Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson, the album finds Taylor stretching her songwriting legs with a rocking country sound (that isn’t afraid to blend in a little disco) and her contemporary acid wit. Taylor knows how to have a good time — and how to appreciate it after all the bad ones.

RACHEL CHOLST

Country Proud feat. Brooke Eden, Shelly Fairchild, Chris Housman, Angie K & Adam Mac

Friday, June 9, 10:15 a.m. to 1:20 p.m. at Hard Rock Stage

Last year, Emily and Jamie Dryburgh’s RNBW organization, a powerful force for communitybuilding among LGBTQ musicians in Nashville, hosted its inaugural Country Proud showcase during CMA Fest — the first specific celebration of queer talent at the fest. It’s back and even bigger this year, with a hard-to-miss spot down by the riverfront and a lineup of artists who pull from a wide range of country traditions but don’t let themselves be bound by them. Angie K draws on Latin dance styles as well as the strong Latino influence on country music in her work, while Adam Mac’s excellent new LP Disco Cowboy is exactly what it says on the jacket. Brooke Eden and Chris Housman hew a little closer to contemporary commercial country, while you’ll get a bit of everything from Shelly Fairchild; these folks have a lot of stories to share, and you’re gonna want to hear them.

STEPHEN TRAGESER

Madeline Edwards

Friday, June 9, 4 p.m. at Chevy Riverfront Stage Madeline Edwards’ voice will stop you in your tracks, so passing by her set is a mistake you’re unlikely to make. Edwards has performed in pretty much every genre

you can think of, and her take on pop country in Crashlanded fits her like a glove. The title track captures the isolation of making your way in a world that works against you, while “Mama, Dolly, Jesus” is a rousing song that tells the people responsible for that alienation where to go. Don’t take our word for it, though: The Highwomen invited Edwards to join them for their contribution to the bonus tracks on Lady Gaga’s 10th anniversary reissue of Born This Way, and Chris Stapleton invited her to tour with him. Game recognizes game, after all. RACHEL CHOLST

Dalton Dover

Friday, June 9, 9:40 p.m. at Nissan Platform Stage; Saturday, 2 p.m. at Chevy Vibes Stage Georgia singer-songwriter Dalton Dover has been one of the most exciting new country artists this year. A triple threat, Dover writes, plays guitar with exceptional skill and belts it out with the best of them. He learned to sing in church, and that shows in his silky voice and arena-ready performances. Dover’s music is part country and part rock, with a little bit of hip-hop and a whole lot of catchy pop hooks. He blew up on TikTok, but he’s no flash in the pan: A chance to catch Dover in person should not be missed. RACHEL CHOLST

Chapel Hart

Friday, June 9, 1:15 p.m. at Chevy Vibes Stage Caring for your family through the ups and downs of living on earth is a major theme in country music. It’s a driving force for trio Chapel Hart — sisters Danica and Devynn Hart and their cousin Trea Swindle — and it’s a common thread running through their rocking new LP Glory Days. As they put in the work to build a country career on their own terms, they had a major breakout performance on America’s Got Talent last year and have been burning up the road this year, including performances on the CMT Awards and ACM Awards. It shouldn’t be long before they’re taking some of those trophies home. STEPHEN TRAGESER

Kat & Alex

Saturday, June 10, 12:30 p.m. at Chevy Vibes Stage

Duet partners don’t have to be married in order to sound great. Nashvilleresiding duo Kat & Alex happen to be both, and they use everything about their connection to make phenomenal music that is heartfelt and feels like it comes from lived experience. They also highlight how much mainstream country music means to Latino people. Last year, Kat & Alex released a fine seven-song set called Side A, and its companion Lado B, which features the same songs sung beautifully in Spanish. STEPHEN

TRAGESER

Roberta Lea

Saturday, June 10, 2 p.m. at Spotlight Stage (inside Fan Fair X at the Music City Center)

Going to a Roberta Lea set will make you feel like a part of her family. Lea specializes in songs about the support she’s received from her loved ones to chase her dream of country stardom. And to hear her sing about her home state of Virginia, you’ll wish you were from there, too. Lea’s charisma is matched only by her singing voice, and her recent single “Too Much of a Woman” is too badass a song to be contained by your earbuds.

RACHEL CHOLST

Neon Union

Saturday, June 10, 3:35 p.m. at Maui Jim Reverb Stage Newcomer duo Neon Union, composed of Miamiborn Leo Brooks and North Carolinaraised Andrew Millsaps, has a chemistry that borders on the magical. Brooks notched his belt in the Miami club scene, and he’s worked with the likes of Lauryn Hill and J. Lo, while Millsaps cut his teeth writing songs as a teenager in Surry County — home to Mount Airy, the small town that inspired Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show The two harmonize as if they’ve known each other their whole lives and bring an intriguing mix of country, pop and R&B to the table. No wonder they’ve toured with both Pitbull (in whose touring band Brooks has played bass) and Scotty McCreery.

RACHEL CHOLST ■

ANGIE K

Kendrick Lamar, Odesza and Foo Fighters Headline Bonnaroo

Plus, we declare Diarrhea Planet the unofficial Thursday headliners

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ, STEPHEN TRAGESER AND COLE VILLENA

Diarrhea Planet

Per tradition, there is no official headliner on Thursday, but Diarrhea Planet, who’ll take over That Tent at 11:45 p.m., are headliners in our hearts. The pop ’n’ punk guitarmy honed their chops in Nashville rock clubs and built an exceptional international fan base before they said farewell in 2018. To the delight of many, they reunited for a couple of gigs in November, playing the final shows at Exit/In under its longtime management. The last time the Planeteers went down to the Farm, back in 2014, the show spilled over from the tiny stage they were booked on and into the audience (and at one point, the literal rafters). At the very least, come prepared to spend this set in the biggest circle pit you’ve ever seen.

STEPHEN TRAGESER

Odesza

Seattle electronic production duo Odesza’s icon is an icosahedron — kind of like a 20-sided die that you would use in a roleplaying game, which is an appropriate point of reference since Odesza is simultaneously somewhat niche and exceptionally popular. Though it might be tough to pick out the pair (aka Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight) in a crowd, they are headlining heaps of music festivals across the U.S. this year, a phenomenon writer Grant Sharples recently explored in depth for Stereogum. The common thread among the fans Sharples spoke with is that the live show — full of sophisticated lights, projected animation and lots more to go along with the duo’s textured electronic soundscapes — has to be seen in person. There’s a feature-length film presentation of Odesza’s show coming to theaters in July, but you’ll have your chance at What Stage at 11 p.m. Saturday. STEPHEN TRAGESER

Listening Local

Catch a wide variety of Nashville musicians at Bonnaroo

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

BONNAROO ALWAYS BRINGS artists representing tons of different musical traditions from far and wide to Middle Tennessee, but there’s also a substantial amount of local talent in the mix. That’s easy to see on Thursday, when you could spend your entire day seeing only musicians from Nashville.

Among those are Grammywinning ’grassers Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, who’ll give you a preview of their forthcoming LP El Dorado at 5 p.m. at That Tent, and hometown heroes Diarrhea Planet, who play That Tent at 11:45 p.m. In the refresh of Centeroo that fans saw for the first time in 2022, the Who Stage was enlarged and moved to a new spot. This year, it will showcase a variety of Music City folks including wide-ranging pop ’n’ rockers Nordista Freeze at 4 p.m. and The Medium at 5:15 p.m., post-grunge rockers with bite Venus & the Flytraps at 7:45 p.m. and purveyor of jazz-inflected, electronically enhanced instrumental wizardry Rich Ruth at 9 p.m. Out in the general admission campground, you’ll have additional chances to see many of the local Who Stage performers (and those from elsewhere) throughout the weekend at Plaza 2: Toyota Music Den. Speaking of the campground, seasoned country songsmith Kendell Marvel will bring his Honky Tonk Experience showcase to Plaza 1: Galactic Giddy-Up at midnight on Thursday, while Hogslop String Band has sets there at 8 p.m. Thursday and at 1 a.m. for Saturday’s night owls.

Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar’s latest album, 2022’s Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, is maybe his most challenging, personal and even divisive release yet. But for all the mixed reactions the LP elicited, it did little to knock the crown off his head. K. Dot remains the best rapper of his generation, if not the best rapper alive — just listen to the vocal athletics on the recent remix of Beyoncé’s “America Has a Problem” for a sample of his prowess. Not just that, he’s a great and fiery live performer (check out his crown-of-thorns-adorned Glastonbury 2022 show). This marks the second time the good kid from Compton headlines Bonnaroo, taking the spotlight Friday at 11 p.m. on What Stage.

ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

Foo Fighters

Foo Fighters are standard-bearers of a bygone era of Huge Rock Bands, but unlike rock titans of the last century — who stayed in the headlines by, say, trashing hotel rooms or fighting onstage — Dave Grohl and his band have cultivated an image as generally nice guys who just love to bang out riffs for hours onstage. That lovable public image made it especially tragic when drummer Taylor Hawkins died on tour in 2022 when he suffered cardiac arrest at the band’s hotel for reasons that have never been confirmed. But Here We Are, released June 2, is the Foos’ first record without Hawkins since 1999, and recently released track “The Teacher” serves as a sprawling goodbye to the smiling long-haired drummer. In May, the band announced the arrival of new drummer Josh Freese, who by all accounts has used his own experience with Huge Rock Bands like Guns N’ Roses and Paramore to slot seamlessly into the Foo Fighters’ rhythm section. Sunday’s set (slated for 9:30 p.m. at What Stage) won’t just be an early look at the revitalized lineup: It’ll be a showcase of the kind of rock ’n’ roll that puts a smile on your face — and makes you throw your devil horns in the air — no matter what life throws at you. COLE VILLENA ■

The roster of Nashvillians is a bit lighter on Friday, but not without standouts like indie rockers Arts Fishing Club (Who Stage, 2:45 p.m.) and glamster Gyasi (10:15 p.m.). Locals are all over the big stages on Saturday — see our daily breakdown for notes on Sheryl Crow, Jenny Lewis and Devon Gilfillian — but don’t miss out on indie-pop crew Colony House (This Tent, 2:45 p.m.).

Sunday, your homegrown players include country hitmaker Kip Moore (Which Stage, 1 p.m.), who released his fifth LP Damn Love in April, and rootsrockin’ songsmith Cecilia Castleman (Who Stage, 5:15 p.m.), who’s recently released a spate of singles produced by Don Was. Meanwhile, ever-evolving rock ’n’ pop institution Paramore, stopping in on the tour for their latest LP This Is Why, warms up the main What Stage for Foo Fighters at 7:15 p.m. And if you’re planning to extend your Sunday night into Monday morning, much-loved Nashville DJ crew Sparkle City Disco closes out the fest at Where in the Woods, going on at 1:30 a.m. ■

PHOTO: STEVE CROSS

MOLLY TUTTLE & GOLDEN HIGHWAY

RICH RUTH

PARAMORE

PLAY ALONG! When you spot any of the items below, let us know on social media. Don’t forget to tag it with the hashtag #BonnarooBingo and our handle, @NashvilleScene

Illustration by Molly Brooks

Bonnaroo Thursday

Settle in on the Farm with hiphop, rock, soul and lots more

BY HANNAH CRON

THURSDAY AT BONNAROO is the kiddie pool of the weekend — a chance to get your feet wet, get used to the temperature and find your music-fest sea legs. (Tennes-see legs?

Expect a lot of walking, anyway.) Thursday’s lineup is stacked with some of the best upand-coming artists in the Nashville music scene. We’ve got a separate roundup of local artists to check out, so here’s a look at out-oftowners you won’t want to miss.

If you’re camping out way early, a Pride Parade featuring the Human Rights Campaign starts at noon at House of Yes (Plaza 3 out in the campgrounds). Afro Cuban maestro of Caribbean hip-hop and funk Cimafunk and queen of bounce Big Freedia will be taking part; both will perform later as well.

On the heels of her 2022 album All of Us Flames, Ezra Furman — whom you’ll have heard quite a bit on the soundtrack to Netflix’s hit series Sex Education — will rock That Tent starting at 3:45 p.m. Broadway star, honorary Highwoman and — as I know

Bonnaroo Friday

The hip-hop undercard takes flight on Bonnaroo Day 2, and that’s not all

BY SEAN L. MALONEY

IT’S BONNAROO FRIDAY and we got to stay hy-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-drated — because rap legends Three 6 Mafia are on Which Stage at 7:45 p.m. We need to be on top of our game — this is a party marathon, not a party sprint. If you’ve never seen Memphis heroes Triple 6 on close-to-home turf, get ready to watch the locals get buck. DJ Paul, Juicy J and their crew — who will sadly be minus the late, great Gangsta Boo, who died in January — have a catalog two decades deep with some of the rowdiest club bangers the world has ever known. “Tear da Club Up” still goes harder than just

her — cast member of the 2000s reboot of The Electric Company Celisse is set to bring her stellar vocals and her phenomenal band to This Tent at 6:15 p.m.

It-girl songsmith Suki Waterhouse is at

That Tent at 8:15 p.m., fresh off her first album and EP, both released last year. Waterhouse also recently starred in Amazon’s adaptation of Daisy Jones and the Six, but fans may be just as likely to

catch her set hoping to get a side-stage glimpse of her sparkly boyfriend, Robert Pattinson.

The aforementioned Cimafunk and his massive nine-person backing band head to This Tent at 9:45 p.m., while Gen-Z rap sensation 070 Shake will follow at This Tent at 11:30 p.m. Hometown heroes Diarrhea Planet (more on them in our roundup of headliners, unofficial though their status may be) will start at That Tent at 11:45 p.m., and the alsoaforementioned Big Freedia takes over at 1:30 a.m.

For those looking to follow the beat of their electronic dance hearts, the stages at The Other and Where in the Woods will be in full swing Thursday as well. Mersiv hits The Other at 10:15 p.m., followed by Liquid Stranger at 11:30 p.m. and Zeds Dead at 12:45 a.m.; if you can’t get enough Zeds Dead, they’re also on at Where in the Woods from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m.

It’s the first real day of the festival, so it’s a great time to catch those late-night happenings before the long hours catch up with you. A few other notable recurring events for the night owls: Dublab’s ambient Tonalism experience happens midnight to 6 a.m. nightly at The Fun House & The Grove (campground Plaza 7) and the Silent Disco is open each night at Who Stage from midnight to 3:30 a.m. ■

about anything else I could name, “Stay Fly” will remain in your head for days, and you can count on everyone from the crustiest festie to the most genteel soccer mom to drop it low to “Poppin’ My Collar.” Three 6 is Tennessee music at its finest.

The ’Roo hip-hop undercard spreads its wings Friday, bringing the cream of the crop from across the country and around the globe. You can start your day with Zambian rapper Sampa the Great, who’s at This Tent at 1:45 p.m. — all spring, “Avalanche of Love,” her collaboration with Zamrock legends W.I.T.C.H., has been in constant rotation, and we’re stoked to see her border-busting, genre-bending catalog come to life. You can stay up way late for Atlanta-born rising star Destroy Lonely, whose “Bane” was a viral hit with the TikTok kids and who takes over This Tent at 2 a.m. Right in the middle is producer-MC Baby Keem, bringing his new-school West Coast flow to What Stage at 8:45 p.m. He’ll be warming it up for his cousin Kendrick

Lamar, who appears on Keem’s Grammywinning 2021 banger “Family Ties.”

The rest of our plans for Friday run the pop-music gamut, just the way we like it. Alt-goth punks AFI open up the main What Stage at 3 p.m. U.K. skronk-funk outliers Black Midi are brainy and bold, pushing and progressive, thoroughly and absolutely engaging. Prepare to have your wigdome rattled when their rippin’ jazz-punk assault starts at This Tent at 3:15 p.m. MUNA (What Stage, 4:45 p.m.) really came into their own with their 2022 self-titled LP, their third overall and first since linking up with Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. As part of a one-two punch with singer, Tennessee Equality Project benefit star and John Wick: Chapter 4 supporting player Rina Sawayama (Which Stage, 5:45 p.m.), MUNA conjures up shimmering pop and dynamic

dance vibes that are not to be missed. Charley Crockett’s dusty, rootsy folk makes That Tent at 6:30 the stop for a little downlow dinnertime fun — a moment to refuel the soul while double-fisting arepas and crushing some more water. If you’re looking to cool it down a little further, Philly’s Alex G (This Tent, 7 p.m.) has your back.

Late-night plans? That’s simple: Sylvan Esso takes over That Tent at 12:30 a.m. The North Carolina duo has been pushing the pop envelope for more than a decade, creating some of the most sublime synthesis you’ll find on record. On 2022’s No Rules Sandy, the duo is in peak form, with Amanda Meath’s finely tuned voice blooming in the next-level soundscapes she creates with Nick Sanborn. From their early fan fave “Hey Mami” to their recent “Echo Party,” Sylvan Esso has a stack of party-starters ready to go. ■

BIG FREEDIA

SAMPA THE GREAT

SYLVAN ESSO

Bonnaroo Saturday

From rootsy rock and charming pop to full-on multimedia experiences and beyond, it’s a busy day in Manchester

BY SEAN L. MALONEY

FILL UP THAT WATER BOTTLE and slather on that SPF 50: It’s Saturday and we, as a great American poet once sang, are gonna soak up the sun down on the Farm. The Scene recently caught a set from said poet, Nashville-area resident Sheryl Crow, just last summer at the return of Live on the Green. Since then, she’s leveled up to become Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Sheryl Crow, and we can only imagine that the radiant vibe of her roots-pop shines brighter than ever. Expect the hits to come back-to-back-to-back when she takes What Stage at 4:45 p.m. Crow is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Saturday’s lineup of amazing women. Indie-pop singer-songwriter, actress and all-around swell person Jenny Lewis (who also recently moved to Music City) will hit Which Stage at 3:45 p.m., fresh from the June 9 release of her LP Joy’all. The lead single “Cherry Baby” is a shimmering, hipswinging slice of soft rock that feels readymade for a Saturday afternoon. On the flip side of Lewis’ coin — both of whose sides are clever as hell and charming as fuck, but, y’know, sound different — is New Zealand quartet The Beths, who are at That Tent at 1:30 p.m. Leader Elizabeth Stokes is a master of the cheeky quip, and the pogo-primed fuzz-pop of tunes like “Expert in a Dying

Bonnaroo Sunday

Wrap up your ’Roo weekend with DJs classic and contemporary, some of the best rock bands in the biz and more

BY HANNAH CRON

IT’S SUNDAY AT BONNAROO — your sunburn is starting to peel, you’ve got mud in crevices you didn’t know existed, and it’s a good idea to watch for symptoms of dehydration. Luckily, there’s a killer lineup to get you through the last day.

It might not qualify as “early rising” in any other context, but Ecuadorian Swiss guitar virtuosos Hermanos Gutiérrez play That Tent for the sorta-early birds at 1:15 p.m. If you’re looking for a peppier vibe, Sammy Rae & The Friends bring their funky indie rock to What Stage at 1:45 p.m.

Later, jazz drummer, composer and improviser extraordinaire Makaya McCraven will take the stage at This Tent at 2:15 p.m., while dance-centric, post-punky Scottish indie rockers Franz Ferdinand head to Which Stage at 2:30 p.m. In the early evening, you have a few options for dreamy indie rock from other countries. Quebecois trio Men I Trust plays That Tent at 4:45 p.m., while Norwe-

Field” and “Knees Deep” is sure to kick off your Saturday in high gear.

Seeking out some soul stretched into new and marvelous forms? Look no further than Danielle Ponder (Which Stage, 2 p.m.) and Remi Wolf (This Tent, 6:15 p.m.), who are both molding wonderfully modern music from classic American sounds. Ponder, a former public defender from Rochester, N.Y., makes spaced-out, gospel-grounded, hiphop-inflected soul on 2022’s Some of Us Are Brave that engages the intellect and sends the heart soaring. Wolf, on the other hand, is an art-pop weirdo whose early live-wire almost-novelty tunes like “Photo ID” and “Disco Man” have evolved into a hippie-soul and indie-rock hybrid (as you hear in cuts like “Michael” and “Prescription”) that will feel just right in Manchester.

Nashvillian Devon Gilfillian’s Love You Anyway, his latest for Fantasy Records, lands in a sweet spot between the slippery soul of Shuggie Otis and the lysergic vibes of late-’60s Isley Brothers — catch Gilfillian at That Tent at 3 p.m. Funky guitar man Cory Wong plays a regular set at This Tent at 4:30 p.m., and returns at 8:15 p.m. to lead Cory Wong’s Syncopated Superjam Lil Nas X, a maestro of multiple media who is doing the most with the power of the pop-star identity in the 21st century, takes What Stage at 8:45 p.m.

Tyler Childers, who’s pushing country, string-band and other related music in exciting new directions, hits Which Stage at 9:45 p.m. EarthGang collaborator and J. Cole associate J.I.D has been dropping some of the smartest, catchiest rap music of the past decade, and he’s at That Tent at 1 a.m. And grab your shell-toes and track suits for numetal icons Korn, who will unleash the freaks at This Tent starting at 12:45 a.m. ■

gian songsmith girl in red is on Which Stage at 6:15 p.m.

Folk-heads, meanwhile, can catch Marcus Mumford (sans Sons) at Which Stage at 8:15 p.m. If you prefer to keep on ravin’, The Other keeps cooking too, with O.G. producer MK at 5:30 p.m., Jauz — who was born in 1993, the year MK had his first hit with “Always”

— at 6:45 p.m., and Swedish producer Alesso

at 8:15 p.m.

As the sun heads for the horizon, ’Roo ’23 goes out with a bang, with a stacked schedule featuring some of the best rock bands in the business. Hometown heroes Paramore, fresh off the release of This Is Why, are at the main What Stage at 7:15 p.m., while ’90s alt-rock legends Pixies — unfortunately without Kim Deal, though bassist Paz Lenchantin is no slouch — close out That Tent starting

at 8:15 p.m. They’ll tee up the Foo Fighters (read more about them and their new lineup, featuring seasoned drummer Josh Freese in place of the late Taylor Hawkins, in our headliners roundup) at What Stage at 9:30 p.m. Be sure to note the earlier headliner start time for Sunday, offering Bonnaroovians a chance to get out early and prepare to go back to their less-glittery real lives.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

PIXIES

MAKAYA McCRAVEN

JENNY LEWIS

JUNE 8, 9 & 10 12 - 6 PM

BMI BLOCK PARTY FREE LIVE MUSIC ON PNC PLAZA

JUNE 18 STYX WITH EDWIN McCAIN

NOVEMBER 18

TEDDY SWIMS WITH FREAK FREELY ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM

JUNE 6, 2024

MATT RIFE ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM

UPCOMING SHOWS AT THE MUSEUM’S CMA THEATER

JUNE 14 RINA SAWAYAMA HOLD THE GIRL TOUR: RELOADED (ACOUSTIC SHOW)

JUNE 17 BRUCE COCKBURN WITH SPECIAL GUEST DAR WILLIAMS

JUNE 27 JAKE SHIMABUKURO

JULY 25 STEVE VAI INVIOLATE TOUR 2023

AUGUST 5 LORI McKENNA THE TOWN IN YOUR HEART TOUR WITH SPECIAL GUEST BRANDON RATCLIFF

SEPTEMBER 6 JOHN OATES AN EVENING OF SONGS AND STORIES FEATURING GUTHRIE TRAPP

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

Museum members receive exclusive pre-sale opportunities for CMA Theater concerts. Learn more at CountryMusicHallofFame.org/Membership.

BOOKED BY @NATIONALSHOWS2 • NATIONALSHOWS2.COM

The CMA Theater is a property of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

224 REP. JOHN LEWIS WAY S • NASHVILLE, TN CMATHEATER.COM • @CMATHEATER

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WEEKLY ROUNDUP OF THINGS TO DO

THURSDAY / 6.8

MUSIC

ON THE OL’ CORNER] MUSICIANS CORNER FEAT. NASHVILLE SYMPHONY, SAVANNAH CONLEY, THE BRUMMIES & MORE

[NIGHTS

When the organizers of widely loved free music fest Musicians Corner talk about wanting to make sure everyone can have access to a wide variety of great music, they mean songwriters, rockers, R&B artists and the occasional rapper. But there’s even more to the lineup than that: In the late spring, the Grammy-winning Nashville Symphony does a slew of free community concerts all over town, and one of the regular stops is Musicians Corner in Centennial Park. They’ll appear there Thursday night after songsmiths Liz Longley, Autumn Nicholas and Eli Fox warm up the stage. Friday, guests include singer-songwriter Savannah Conley (whose pop-and-rock-informed LP Playing the Part of You Is Me came out in May), as well as country-schooled picker and singer Kristina Murray and Mon Rovîa, whose blend of West African and Appalachian folk you might have heard at Joy Oladokun’s recent album release party. Sunday, check out a return visit from erstwhile Nashvillian future-folkster James Wallace, aka Skyway Man, dreamy indie rockers The Brummies, the soul-kissed stylings of Banditos and lots more. Thursday through Saturday at Centennial Park, 2500 West End Ave. STEPHEN TRAGESER FILM

IS SO FETCH] MOVIES IN THE PARK: MEAN GIRLS

[THAT

For the second installment in our free annual Movies in the Park series, the events department here at the Nashville Scene is bringing you the stone-cold Aughts classic responsible for such enduring quotes as, “She doesn’t even go here!” and, “Get in loser, we’re going shopping.” Now 19 years old (yes, really), the Tina Feypenned teen comedy not only gave star Lindsay Lohan a pathway out of Disney fare, but also established Fey — already a multiseason veteran of Saturday Night Live at the time — as a leading voice in

the world of comedy. Fey also managed to slip a number of her SNL pals into the cast, with Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler all delivering top-notch performances. As always, food trucks will be present at MIP (including Daddy’s Dogs, Retro Sno, Ben & Jerry’s and many more), with games, sponsor giveaways and other activities kicking off at 5 p.m. and the screening following at sundown, usually around 8. Bring the family, bring the dogs — everyone’s welcome. Movies in the Park will continue June 15 with Top Gun: Maverick and June 22 with Lightyear 5 p.m. at Elmington Park, 3531 West End Ave.

D. PATRICK RODGERS

[SCHOOL’S OUT]

MUSIC

CATIE TURNER

I can’t decide if former American Idol contestant and 23-year-old pop singer Catie Turner’s 2021 EP Heartbroken and Milking It is better than her 2019 EP The Sad Vegan, but the Pennsylvaniaborn songwriter sounds more confident on Heartbroken. Of course, taking into account the doleful, the-world-is-too-much tone Turner adopts on her tunes, it’s not confidence she lacks — she writes about not fitting in and being bored, and you have to admit she gives the impression she wants to use style as a barrier against that big, bad world. As a stylist, she reminds me of Billie Eilish in her savvy use of pretty hip musical elements that only seem marginally

THURSDAY, JUNE 8

The Basement East

CATIE TURNER

MEAN GIRLS

dumbed down, as on the Heartbroken tracks “Therapy” and “Push You Away.” The former track hints at everything from bossa nova to Hozier, while “Push You Away” might be the richest thing she’s done to date. As she told writer Brigid Young in a 2021 piece for Poptized, “It has to happen to me in order for me to write about it.” Turner gets into the timeless themes of conformity, teenage fashions and useless nostalgia on her EPs, and her music — for all its severe formal constraints — usually proves deeper and more seductive than you might think at first. Sophie Holohan opens. 8 p.m. at The Basement East, 917 Woodland St. EDD HURT

MUSIC [REBLOG] DIANE YOUNG INDIE NIGHT

I’ll admit I originally got into Vampire Weekend because I had a crush on someone who loved them. (EDITOR’S

NOTE: Same!) From 2008 (when the band released its eponymous first album and single “A-Punk”) to 2013 (when they dropped Modern Vampires of the City), it seemed a Vampire Weekend song could be on the soundtrack of anyone’s life. The band was in Just Dance, in movies like Step Brothers and all over alternative radio. By the time their latest album, Father of the Bride, came out in 2019, the way we consume music had changed enough that nothing could be quite so ubiquitous. For their so-called Diane Young Indie Night, DJ Nordista Freeze and the aptly named cover band NOT VAMPIRE WEEKEND will look to capture the nostalgia by playing Modern Vampires of the City — now 10 years old! — from top to bottom, along with a DJ set of adjacent tunes. I dare you to listen to “Step” and not feel something.

From its opening track, the album features banger after banger, including “Ya Hey,” “Diane Young,” “Unbelievers” and “Hannah Hunt.” Sometimes people enter your life to introduce you to Vampire Weekend. 8 p.m. at The Blue Room at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave. S. HANNAH HERNER

FRIDAY / 6.9

MUSIC [OLD FRIEND] THE CADILLAC THREE

Sometimes you can tell band members are true friends and not just business partners. In the case of The Cadillac Three, born-and-bred Nashville musicians Jaren Johnston, Neil Mason and Kelby Ray have been palling around together since high school. Their camaraderie is evident in every live show they play, as they blast through song after song with ease. The highenergy trio fuses outlaw country and classic Southern rock, though their hard-hitting swagger has taken a more tender tone with their most recent song. “This Town Is a Ghost” was written by lead singer Jaren Johnston about his father’s death: “I see you in every truck that passes by / Louisiana tags, yeah, I pull over and cry / Oh, where did the time go? / ’Cause your Rolex is still tickin’.” The group’s soulful turn shows that, in the best of cases, band and family can be one and the same. The Cadillac Three will play Friday at Ascend as part of CMA Fest (read more about that in this week’s cover package), with Randy Rogers Band, Tenille

Townes and more also on the evening’s bill. 7 p.m. at Ascend Amphitheater, 310 First Ave. S. TOBY ROSE

THEATER

FILM [AH-OOH!] AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON

r scary would sound right at home on a 2008 Warped Tour lineup alongside neon-era poppunk acts like Mayday Parade, All Time Low or We the Kings. V3RN, a Nashville-based five-piece, hasn’t been shy about its 2000s inspirations — the video for their debut single “End My Night” looks exactly like those Windows Movie Maker lyric videos you used to watch back before YouTube started policing copyrighted music, down to the upload credit for “XxV3RNIE69420xX.”

[LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE] ELITE

STUDIO WORKS: AT BIRTH AND SERENA

Elite Studio Works is back this weekend with an intriguing double bill of new works at the Darkhorse Theater. First up, At Birth (written and performed by Ty Autry and Thalia Gonzalez Kane), which asks the age-old question: “What could possibly go wrong when one drunken night, Anna (very gay) and Isaac (very, very gay), have sex to heal from a breakup?” Exploring themes of queer families, friendship, community and more, At Birth recently played at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival and the Barons Court Theatre in London, and will be heading to the Queerly Fringe Festival in New York later in June. Also on deck, Erin-Grace Bailey’s Serena (The Other Story of Cyrano de Bergerac). Offering a “lighthearted reimagining” of the classic tale, Serena promises an evening full of “romance, wit, music and swashbuckling.” The new piece features a solid ensemble of players, including Bob Roberts, Alaina Bozarth, Kolin Lawler, Dianne DeWald, Miles Gatrell, Emma Reinbold, Patricyonna Rodgers, Steve Wrigley and Maria Sebastian. June 9-10 at the Darkhorse Theater, 4610 Charlotte Ave. AMY STUMPFL

From his dickish on-set behavior (Eddie Murphy almost laid him out when they were doing Coming to America) to the three deaths that took place on the set of his film Twilight Zone: The Movie, it’s no big secret that John Landis is perhaps the biggest piece of shit to come out of the New Hollywood era. (Apparently he passed that shittiness down to his son Max, who’s spent the past decade writing forgettable genre flicks and racking up sexual assault allegations.) And yet, it can’t be denied that the man directed some crazy-ass classics during his late-’70s/early-’80s prime, like his 1981 spin on the time-honored Wolf Man story, An American Werewolf in London This self-proclaimed “monster movie” pulled off the unorthodox-at-the-time feat of being scary as fuck (Rick Baker’s revolutionary special makeup effects got him the first-ever Oscar for Best Makeup) while also pulling out moments of laughout-loud hilarity. While today’s audiences expect a horror movie to be both campy and creepy, it was Landis — that flaming asshole — who was the first to prove that it could successfully be both. 7 p.m. at Full Moon Cineplex, 3455 Lebanon Pike CRAIG D. LINDSEY

MUSIC [BOYS LIKE GIRLS R SCARY] V3RN EP RELEASE SHOW

The five songs on V3RN’s May EP girls

That said, girls r scary is a lovely slice of nostalgia that should be perfect listening for summertime driving. It hits all the 2000s and pop-punk staples: There are “whoaohs!” There’s a voicemail in the middle of a song! V3RN even adds its own entry to the proud canon of songs about how everything will be different once you’re in your mid-20s with “twentyfive!” The band will celebrate the EP’s release with two likeminded local acts at The Basement. Jack the Underdog skews more toward the 2020s pop-punk revival sound typified by artists like Machine Gun Kelly, while Pepperwood’s “San Francisco” is propelled by a jangly Midwest emo riff. 7 p.m. at The Basement, 1604 Eighth Ave. S. COLE VILLENA

SATURDAY / 6.10

FOOD & DRINK

PROTECTION PROGRAM] LOU BAKE SALE

[PASTRY

Pastry power players are teaming up (again) for lou’s latest bake sale, a joint benefit between too many of your favorite kitchens and businesses to list here. Since its first bake sale in October 2019, lou has raised around $60,000 with limited-time, limited-quantity pop-ups next to its East Side location. Saturday’s Pride-themed effort will benefit the ACLU of Tennessee, the legal anchor for recent efforts to fight anti-trans legislation passed by the state this year. The delectable list of menu items includes white chocolate brownies with rainbow vanilla frosting from Henrietta Red, rainbow-sprinkled gooey butter cookies from Roze Pony and rainbow meringues from Butcher & Bee and Redheaded Stranger, to name a few. “Lou and many, many other small businesses feel a responsibility to draw attention and light to a topic that is often met with disapproval in Middle Tennessee,” says lou chef and

SERENA

PHOTO: ALLISON SHRUM

Ilya Toshinskiy

1:00 pm · FORD THEATER

Saturday, June 17 SONGWRITER SESSION

Erin Enderlin

NOON · FORD THEATER

Sunday, June 18

MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT

Kristin Wilkinson

1:00 pm · FORD THEATER

Saturday, June 24

HATCH SHOW PRINT Block Party

10:00 am, 1:00 pm, and 3:30 pm

HATCH SHOW PRINT SHOP LIMITED AVAILABILITY

Saturday, June 24

SONGWRITER SESSION

Adam Wood

NOON · FORD THEATER

CHARLES ESTEN with TEXAS HILL

WMOT Roots Radio Presents

Finally Fridays feat. PETER ONE, MIKO MARKS & MYRA BYRNE

GARY NICHOLSON & THE CHANGE featuring JAMES PENNEBAKER, MIKE JOYCE, LYNN

WILLIAMS, PETE WASNER, JIM HOKE & special Guest JONELL MOSSER

on 3rd featuring MARK IRWIN, LANCE MILLER & ADAM WOOD with BRITTANY MOORE & CADEN GILLARD

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owner Mailea Weger. “We ask our friends and community to donate their time, talent and hard-earned dollars to help ACLU-TN fight with litigation for the human rights we believe is a birthright for every person.” 5 p.m. at lou, 1304 McGavock Pike ELI

[TOWER OF SONG]

MUSIC

MOTYCKA

PYLON REENACTMENT SOCIETY

The B-52’s were the first to emerge, and R.E.M. the biggest-selling and most widely recognized, but as far as Reaganera Athens, Ga., alternative rock bands are concerned, Pylon, to those who know them, might be the most beloved. No-nonsense, yet not afraid to have fun, the foursome and its lyrically minimalist, irrepressibly groovy and impossibly cool take on postpunk on records like 1980’s Gyrate LP and 1982’s “Beep”/“Altitude” single have stood the test of time and then some. The band’s entire catalog received the deluxe reissue treatment in 2020 on New West. After disbanding in ’83, Pylon reunited intermittently over the years before guitarist Randall Bewley’s death in a car accident in 2009 ended the band for good. Frontwoman Vanessa Briscoe Hay’s Pylon Reenactment Society, an ever-evolving cast of players pulling from all corners of the catalog (and adding some new angles, like a 2018 single issued on Georgia scenester par excellence Henry Owings’ Chunklet Industries), nobly keeps its legacy alive. Palomina and Thayer Sarrano support. 8 p.m. at The Basement, 1604 Eighth Ave. S. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

MUSIC [OF SONGS AND STARGAZING] OPERA ON THE MOUNTAIN

Since 2010, music lovers have gathered at Vanderbilt’s scenic Dyer Observatory each summer to enjoy one of Nashville Opera’s most popular events — Opera on the Mountain. And why not? It’s a fun, family-friendly evening that invites us to slow down and experience this unique art form in a beautiful, relaxed setting. Guests can pack a picnic (BYOB) and check out a wide range of music atop one of Nashville’s highest peaks. Dee Donasco, Valerie Nelson and Steven McCoy will present a terrific lineup of opera and musical theater favorites, including everything from Puccini, Rossini and Offenbach to Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Ukrainian

soprano Natalia Sohil will also be making a special appearance, singing the “Habanera” from Carmen — in Ukrainian, of course. After the performance, guests can do a bit of stargazing through the Dyer’s grand telescope. 6 p.m. at Vanderbilt’s Dyer Observatory, 1000 Oman Drive, Brentwood AMY STUMPFL

[KNOWWHATIMEAN?]

ERNEST DAY

Group Camp One at Montgomery Bell State Park looks more or less the same as it did when it made its feature film debut in 1987. After starring as Kamp Kikakee in the beloved Jim Varney vehicle Ernest Goes to Camp, it’s remained basically frozen in metaphorical amber since it was preserved on celluloid more than three decades ago. And since 2017, it stars again every June as the park hosts Ernest Day, a celebration of everybody’s favorite commercial character turned cult movie hero. From 2 to 5 p.m., rangers will lead a birds-of-prey program and archery lessons, along with three one-hour nature hikes, weather permitting. In honor of Ernest Goes to Camp’s chaotic climactic scene, there will also be turtle catapulting. (The park assures us no turtles will be harmed.) The Ernest lookalike contest will be held at 7 p.m., followed at 7:30 by a Q&A with three cast members: Eddy Schumacher (Counselor Stennis), Todd Lloyd (Chip Ozgood) and Daniel Butler (Eddie). The showing of the film at Group Camp One will begin at approximately 8:30 p.m. Concessions and merchandise will be available. June 10 at Montgomery Bell State Park, 1020 Jackson Hill Road, Burns, Tenn. J.R. LIND

[SUMMERTIME RADNESS]

MUSIC

AHLI W/MAJESKA & YOUNG ROBOT

What better way to kick off the summer than with a night of live music from a killer trio of local artists? Nashville indie label Sky Daddy Collective will present Ahli’s It’s Summer Party at The End with the titular Ahli headlining. If you love all things indie pop and dug last year’s releases from artists like Maggie Rogers or MUNA, Ahli’s flirty new EP Girls Kissing Girls is definitely for you. Their music has been featured on the slightly problematic but still iconic Teen Mom series on MTV, but you can also find their tunes on TikTok if you are too young to grasp the concept of cable TV. Also

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set to perform is R&B pop artist Majeska, who recently made it to the final round of Lightning 100’s Music City Mayhem battle of the bands. If you haven’t heard her music there, be sure to check out her recent releases — she’s been busy releasing both an album and an EP just this year — which sound like something you’d hear in Urban Outfitters and immediately add to your playlist. Rounding out the night are the rockers of Young Robot, playing their selfdescribed “sad boi party anthems.” 8 p.m. at The End, 2219 Elliston Place HANNAH CRON

SUNDAY / 6.11

A. Fuente Ashton CAO

CIGARS FROM

MUSIC

Cohiba

A. Fuente Ashton CAO

Davidoff

Cohiba

Montecristo

Davidoff

Padron

Montecristo

Tatuaje

Padron

Tatuaje

SIMPLICITY] INDIGO GIRLS

[RADICAL

Worst of all, some people genuinely think my last name is Corn. Despite my corn trauma, I can still manage to appreciate the occasional summertime corn on the cob. America even celebrates National Corn on the Cob Day on June 11, and you might as well commemorate it. From the unique creative minds who brought us the Alien Abduction Day run in March comes the It’s Corn! Race, its name taken from the inescapable corn kid TikTok. As with the previous virtual, you can sign up online and participate from anywhere in the world. If you register online, you will receive a “garage-made” corn medal and race bib. As a bonus, 15 percent of each registration fee will go toward the Alzheimer’s Association. Can you imagine a more beautiful thing? June 11, virtual HANNAH CORN CRON

MONDAY / 6.12

[REMEMBER THE SPARTANS]

MUSIC

SPARTA W/ GEOFF RICKLY & ZETA

Zino & Many More Belle Meade Plaza 4518 Harding Road, Nashville, TN 615-297-7963

BELLE MEADE PREMIUM CIGARS & GIFTS

BELLE MEADE PREMIUM CIGARS & GIFTS

Zino & Many More Belle Meade Plaza 4518 Harding Road, Nashville, TN 615-297-7963

In case you need reminding, contemporary folk just means commercial folk. The best work of the late, great Gordon Lightfoot exemplifies commercial folk that cunningly simulated the supposedly pure stuff, and I guess you could put the veteran pop-Americana-folkrock duo Indigo Girls in the pantheon with Lightfoot. After winning a Grammy for, you guessed it, Best Contemporary Folk Recording in 1990 for their self-titled majorlabel debut album, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers embarked on a typical ’90s-style search for new production strategies to buttress their sturdy post-Joan Baez (and by extension, post-1960s) compositions. Give them credit for the tune that helped win them their Grammy, “Closer to Fine” — it’s one of those additions to the folkie canon that contains a sing-along element and the radical simplicity of the timehonored acoustic-guitar tricks it draws from. Elsewhere, producer Mitchell Froom helped them approximate the arty chamber folk and mild rock ’n’ roll of exemplars like singer-songwriters Dan Fogelberg and Jackson Browne on 2006’s Despite Our Differences. The album features a classic blast of folkie indignation titled “Money Made You Mean,” which contains these lines: “Yeah, right or left / It’s all the same conspiracy / Robbin’ Peter to pay Paul / Or robbin’ Peter to pay me.” Director Alexandria Bombach’s documentary film about Ray and Saliers, It’s Only Life After All, debuted this year, and the duo’s 2020 album Look Long contains some of their savviest pop-folk tunes to date. Nashville power popper Aaron Lee Tasjan opens Sunday night; Larkin Poe does the honors Monday. 7:30 p.m. June 11-12 at the Ryman, 116 Rep. John Lewis Way N. EDD

HURT

[NOT THAT KORN] IT’S CORN! VIRTUAL RACE

Corn haunts me. Besides being omnipresent in the American food system — have you looked at a nutrition label lately?! — corn always shows up in my life when I least expect it. My grandparents put up large quantities of it every summer, so I am the rare member of Gen Z who knows how to shuck corn. Kids these days don’t appreciate how sticky someone had to get for them to have their favorite pseudo-vegetable. As an underclassman, I accidentally took a college course about solving world problems that turned out to be an entire semester about corn — papers, documentaries and lectures, all about corn.

While poring over the new coffee table book The Inner Ear of Don Zientara, I caught myself wondering: How would the classic Dischord releases sound if Ian MacKaye had chosen to go to a “proper” recording studio instead of the basement where audio engineer savant Don Z so perfectly documented the D.C. punk scene? The answer might be found in Sparta’s 2002 Wiretap Scars. While the Texas posthardcore unit might commonly be treated like the Kelly Rowland to Mars Volta’s

Beyoncé, their debut LP is like an homage to Fugazi, but funded by David Geffen’s budget. On the celebratory tour of their first album, Sparta is sharing the stage with Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly, a singer who proves that sincerity and charisma don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Absolutely do not miss Venezuelan openers Zeta, who create their brand of punk out of salsa rhythms, prog-rock guitars, AfroCuban beats and a full horn section. Their 2022 LP Todo Bailarlo is an ever-expanding masterwork of celebration and catharsis. 8 p.m. at The Basement East, 917 Woodland St. P.J. KINZER

[THE MAN WHO LOVED LIFE]

MUSIC

BILLY BOB THORNTON AND THE BOXMASTERS

I respect a movie star who can rock. Billy Bob Thornton went to Hollywood in the 1980s striving to become a recording artist but instead fell back on becoming an actor and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Tough break. For the past 15 years he’s been leading The Boxmasters, who are now 12 albums deep. With the help of Grammy Award-winning recording

JUNE

DOORS OPEN

Catie Turner w/ Sophie Holohan

Heart Attack Man w/ Super American, Arm's Length & Photocopy

Big Wreck w/ Gloom Girl MFG

John R. Miller w/ Laura Mae Socks

Sparta w/ Geoff Rickly & Zeta

Petey

Alesana w/ Limbs, Vampires Everywhere, & Across The White Water Tower

Un Año Contigo: Bad Bunny Dance Party

The Beast Street Band: Bruce Springsteen tribute

The Rocket Summer w/ The Juliana Theory

Hermanos Gutiérrez

Faster Pussycat w/ Jason Charles Miller & The Bites

Mustache The Band

Pride Weekend Event: ATHENA

Sweet Tea Dance

Black Midi w/ Friko

Uncle Lucius

The Motet w/ Joe Hertler & The Rainbow Seekers

Annie DiRusso w/ Hannah Cole

THE EMO BAND: Emo + Pop Punk Live Band Karaoke Party

Them Vibes & Ace Monroe

The Dirty Nil & Daniel Romano's Outfit w/ Stoop Kids

Post Sex Nachos w/ Nordista Freeze & Adam Paddock

Sundy Best w/

Bradley Gaskin (6pm)

Collin Nash w/ Jack McKeon (7pm)

Ellisa Sun, Evan Doan Jenkins, Eva Cassel (9pm)

V3RN w/ JACK THE UNDERDOG & PEPPERWOOD (7pm)

Pylon Reenactment Society w/ Palomina and Thayer Sarrano (8pm)

Sam Barber (7pm)

Natasha Blaine, Window Weather, Jenny Rae (9pm)

The Ries Brothers, KNEX, Matt Daughtry (7pm)

Mary Heather Hickman, Stefanie Joyce (9:30pm)

Ben Chapman w/ See Creature, Ricky Young (of The Wild Feathers), Tyler Halverson (7:30pm)

Good Looks (7pm)

Skylar Gregg, Stephie James, Nicole Boggs & The Reel (9pm)

Sam Greenfield W/ PHOEBE KATIS (7pm)

YGTUT w/ MICHAEL DA VINCI, BRIAN BROWN, CHRIS P, BIGG CUP, $HOEY (9pm)

IMY2 w/ Sierra Annie (7pm)

Iguanahead, Zipp Zapp, Small Victory, DJ Tyler Glaser (9pm)

The Chattahoochies (7pm)

Sugadaisy (7pm)

Joseph Huber (7pm)

COME JOIN US!

Live Piano Karaoke

THU 6.8 HAPPY HOUR KARAOKE 6-9 w/Benan Piano karaoke 9-12 w/ Katie Pederson

FRI 6.9 HAPPY HOUR KARAOKE 6-9 w/Dani Ivory

Piano karaoke 9-1 w/Kira Small

SAT 6.10 TABITHA MEEKS 7-9

Piano karaoke 9-1 w/Alan Pelno

SUN 6.11 SECOND SUNDAY HYMN SING 7-8:30

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engineer J.D. Andrew, Thornton melds the sounds of the British Invasion and old-time rockabilly, overlaying them with raw, gritty lyrics. Their best songs lean heavily on dark humor, much like Thornton’s acting. Here’s to following your dreams. All of them. Fran Moran and the Nervous Wrecks will open. 7:30 at City Winery, 609 Lafayette St.

TOBY ROSE

TUESDAY / 6.13

[TIMES NEW ROMANTIC]

MUSIC

DURAN DURAN: FUTURE PAST TOUR

It’s hard to believe that Rock & Roll Hall of Famers Duran Duran were once snubbed as a passing sensation. Written off early by critics, the youthful Durans were dubbed the trendy Tiger Beat alternative to more sinister NME darlings like Spandau Ballet, Ultravox and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. With hits like “Rio” and “Girls on Film,” the U.K. pop group created a Beatlemania-esque teen craze across the U.S. After the New Wave had crested, its poster boys were seen as a casualty of the sea change in the music industry. But at the height of MTV grunge and the infancy of hip-hop radio, Duran Duran released a self-titled album inspired by underground dance music and spawning an improbable return to the top of the charts. With that comeback now 30 years in the rearview mirror, Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and the unrelated Roger and John Taylor are still triumphantly filling arenas. And if their set of super-hits isn’t enough, they’re bringing “Notorious” R&B guitar master Nile Rodgers + Chic along for the ride. 7 p.m. at Bridgestone Arena, 501 Broadway P.J. KINZER

WEDNESDAY / 6.14

[FAVORITE UGLIEST SONS]

MUSIC

DIARRHEA PLANET & TWEN

Diarrhea Planet tweeted out a very important announcement to confused music festivalgoers when they were announced on the Bonnaroo lineup in January: “We are not a joke band with a joke name. We are a very serious band with a joke name.” Nashvillians already knew this, of course: The local garage punks have been assaulting Music City stages with their fourguitar attack for nearly 15 years, and even performed at Exit/In’s final run of shows before it switched owners in November. Curious folks flying into BNA for ’Roo will get a chance to see what all the fuss is about at the band’s downtown Nashville pre-festival show at the Mother Church. Twen, another hard-strumming Nashville outfit whose 2022 release One Stop Shop got a nod in the Scene as one of the best albums of the year, will also take the stage in what promises to be a raucous appetizer ahead of the musical feast down in Manchester. 7:30 p.m at the Ryman, 116 Rep. John Lewis Way N. COLE VILLENA

MUSIC

Gallatin Pike • Nashville TN 37216 sidgolds.com/nashville • 629.800.5847

[NIIGATA AND LONDON’S FINEST] RINA SAWAYAMA

After a bout of laryngitis resulted in British Japanese polymath Rina Sawayama’s previously scheduled Marathon Music Works show getting

canceled, Nashville’s fans have been waiting with deep anticipation for their chance to see one of the most interesting artists in contemporary pop music. And in that intervening time, thanks to Sawayama’s starmaking supporting role in John Wick Chapter 4 — in which she literally climbed a henchman with daggers like he was a mountain — more people are aware of her than ever before. So getting the chance to see an intimate, acoustic show at the CMA Theater at the Country Music Hall of Fame makes for an unexpected chance to rectify that unfortunate bout of illness. Witty, deeply creative, and profoundly kinetic, the openly queer artist (her “This Hell” turns fundamentalist fearmongering into a rapturous banger) is ready to give an acoustic take on her oeuvre before tearing it up at Bonnaroo two days later. It’s the best

of both worlds, some might say, an approach Sawayama’s greatest stuff excels at, mixing metal and pop here, drum-and-bass show tunes there. Not to be missed.

7:30 p.m. at the CMA Theater at the Country Music Hall of Fame, 222 Rep. John Lewis Way N. JASON SHAWHAN

MUSIC

[THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE NOISY] THE BAD PLUS AND MARC RIBOT’S CERAMIC DOG

It’s a rare treat that two of the most influential and progressive jazz/avantgarde trios in recent history are touring together. Both groups push the envelope of contemporary music in their own distinctive fashions, rattling the status quo of formulaic industry tropes. The Bad Plus returns to Tennessee after an appearance at the heralded Big Ears music festival held in Knoxville in April. The group’s enthralling live sets veer from the delicate to the chaotic, incorporating both original material and unique takes on well-known pop hits. Ceramic Dog, fronted by legendary guitarist and songwriter Marc Ribot, is set to release its fifth studio album, Connection, on July 14. The title track, which reflects Ribot’s extremely diverse résumé, finds the noise-rock group at its most accessible while boldly flirting with the divide between indie-pop and avant-garde idioms. The event, set at one of Nashville’s cornerstone venues, is a must-attend for fans of live jazz.

7:30 p.m. at 3rd and Lindsley, 818 Third Ave.

S. JASON VERSTEGEN

NIGERIAN NOSHES

Nico’s Lounge Restaurant and Bar offers a world of flavors

BY ALIJAH POINDEXTER

Nigerian food is among the world’s most underrated cuisines. Luckily for Nashville, Nico’s Lounge Restaurant and Bar has been flying the Naija flag proudly for a number of years out in South Nashville.

Located just a stone’s throw from the intersection of Haywood Lane and Nolensville Pike, Nico’s offers a wide sampling of Nigerian and West African dishes out of an unassuming building that blends seamlessly into its surroundings. The interior is cavernous, complete with a fully stocked bar, gargantuan flat-screen televisions, and a spacious floor plan that easily converts into a quinceañera-ready dance floor and event space. There are plenty of tables, though tableside service itself is limited, with the actual ordering done far in the back of the restaurant out of a minuscule kitchen window. I recommend getting your food to go, though there is ample space to stretch out and tuck in if the jollof cravings become too powerful.

Nigerian food is, like all great culinary traditions, multidimensional. It’s impossible to apply a single adjective to the cuisine, just as it’s difficult to define all cooking within the political borders of Nigeria as solely “Nigerian.” Consider the vast differences contained within the broader umbrellas of Indian, Chinese and Mexican cooking — dishes are usually better categorized by their regional origins. Nigeria is a deceptively large country (bigger than any U.S. state aside from Alaska) with bustling urban centers, lush impenetrable forests, and desolate desert landscapes populated by hundreds of different ethnocultural groups. But anyway — what exactly is Nigerian food?

For one thing, it’s diverse. Nico’s menu runs the gamut from quick and simple items like spicy suya beef kebabs and moi moi — a deliciously savory steamed cake of black-eyed peas and peppery spice — to complex soups and stews. There’s little in the way of descriptive flair on the menu, however, so keep your phone handy for Googling when deciding what to order.

The menu is also chock-full of flavors that manage to surprise as they emerge from the low-key kitchen. The ideal Nigerian dish is spicy (sometimes mouthburningly so) and comes loaded with fresh ingredients, tender meat and umami flavor. One of the best examples is egusi, a hearty stew of ground melon seeds and leafy greens that Nico’s does particularly well. The flavor is smoky and savory, and a hefty amount of palm oil adds a deliciously earthy flavor throughout the dish. This is comfort food at its finest, and its freshness and spice make it all the more addictive. Other dishes make use of Nigeria’s huge amounts of local flora and fauna, including ogbono (wild mango seed) soup and okra stew, which

combine bright flavors with a rich, gelatinous texture that gives each bite a wallop of taste and texture. Goat pepper soup is another star, with a dense and piquant flavor that lovers of game will appreciate.

No main dish is complete without swallow — starchy dough-like side dishes made from tubers or plantains common throughout Africa. Swallow tends to take the place of white rice as the carbohydrate of choice for many Nigerian dishes, and for good reason. The nutty, slightly bitter flavor of swallow (akin to unseasoned mashed potatoes) balances the oily richness present in many Nigerian dishes in a way that rice simply can’t. While the taste is bland when taken

alone, swallow comes alive when eaten with a partner dish. The most famous of these is fufu, an amorphous blob that fascinated me for years before I was able to try it. But Nico’s offers plenty of other options, such as amala, a swallow of Yoruba origin with a wholesome texture and surprising benefits as a low-carb health food.

Then there’s jollof rice, perhaps West Africa’s best-known culinary export. Nico’s is no slouch here either, offering the fragrant tomato-based party rice as a plate with your choice of meat. Jollof rice is a cultural institution throughout West Africa, which is why heated debates around where it came from and which country does it best are still rag-

ing. It strikes a balance between adventurous spice and recognizably savory flavors that just work in a way the great dishes of the world do.

When you see a plate of jollof rice and chicken, or take your first glance at a lovingly prepared stew smelling of smoked crawfish and okra, you see a likely origin for Cajun/Creole jambalaya and crawfish étouffée, Jamaican brown stew chicken and rice and peas, and dozens of other renowned dishes and cuisines. But Nigerian food isn’t only notable for the stories it tells and other dishes it may have inspired. It’s just good eating as well.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NICO’S LOUNGE RESTAURANT AND BAR 4750 NOLENSVILLE PIKE

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

STEWED CHICKEN AND JOLLOF RICE

AT THE MARKET: MAYPOP

FARMSTEAD

Maypop proprietor McCall offers CSA boxes, vends at the Amqui Station Farmers Market and more

BY KELSEY BEYELER

With our series At the Market, we’ll highlight some of our favorite farmers market vendors from the Nashville area.

There is joy at Maypop Farmstead. And fruits and vegetables, goumi berries, elderberries, herbs, flowers, rescue animals and so much more. The mononymous McCall runs the farm and, with their team, distributes its produce throughout Nashville. They do this by selling wholesale and CSA boxes, vending at the Amqui Station Farmers Market, donating to the Nashville Community Fridge, and inviting people to their Joelton farm for tours, horse-riding packages and workshops.

Farming is an arduous job. It’s made even harder for McCall, who is trans, due to transphobic-driven hardships — McCall describes hateful social media messages, property damage and threats to their physical safety. At markets, McCall says, some people steer clear of their booth, or make inappropriate comments. This has compli-

cated their already complex relationship with farmers markets.

“I don’t love that [at] farmers markets, the farmer has to pay to be on public land selling a thing,” says McCall. “It’s complicated, because the market manager does deserve to make a living.”

Even so, they show up when they can because they also have to make a living, and “it’s really important to me to be present in those spaces because it is such important representation,” says McCall.

Despite their challenges, McCall is quick to point out their privileges. The love and attention they pour into their work is apparent when they discuss their animals and farming practices.

“We do try to do good for the soil,” says McCall. “We try to plant native plants, we don’t till or dig with a tractor, and we try to cite our sources and say that it is an Indigenous practice and that it’s not regenerative.”

They’re particularly passionate about herbs, and making teas, tinctures, salts and syrups with them — you might find those products in a CSA box alongside veggies, eggs and more. People can engage with Maypop by buying their products, participating in workshops, boosting social media posts and, perhaps most importantly, just being kind to them and other queer folks. A supportive community makes a world of difference.

“[It’s] so fucking beautiful to be in community with other queer people that are being humans and not adhering to societal gender norms and making their own gender norms and just being beautifully diverse,” says McCall. “I think that that’s a very good reflection of Earth and nature and how plants grow — it’s very, beautifully diverse.” EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

MAYPOP FARMSTEAD MAYPOPFARMSTEAD.COM

McCALL WITH ONE OF MAYPOP’S HORSES

PHOTO: ANGELINA CASTILLO

DARK ENTRIES

In her second monograph, photographer Kristine Potter reflects on the Southern Gothic landscape and the murder ballads that form its soundtrack

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

Photographer Kristine Potter is interested in how the South is perceived — not the artifice of rhinestones and cowboy boots, but haunted landscapes, murder balladry and the women whose deaths inspire the songs.

Potter, who was born in Dallas and raised in Georgia, moved to Nashville in 2018. Before that she was in New York, where she’d lived since finishing graduate school at Yale. Even before moving back down South, Potter was investigating the relationship between landscape and violence. Her first monograph, Manifest (published by TBW in 2018), explores the consequences of Manifest Destiny. Dark Waters continues that exploration, but fo-

cuses on the uniquely macabre intersection of murder ballads and Southern bodies of water with violent names. She began shooting landscapes of East Tennessee.

“The hollers of Appalachia are filled with a very specific kind of energy,” Potter says.

“It seems to me both like slightly ominous, but also totally magical — and extraordinarily beautiful.”

Potter considers technological advances in photography to be central to this work. She shot most of the landscapes during the summer and early fall because she wanted the forest’s canopy to be grown over — not bare trees and well-lit scenery, but dark and moody landscapes befitting names like Bloody Fork and Murder Creek. Photo-

graphic technology allowed her to capture these vistas with a new kind of clarity.

“We have cameras now that can allow us to see in the dark, really sharply,” Potter explains. “And it’s a relatively new feature to be able to do this well. When you think about the history of Southern landscape photography, so much of it relies on this kind of haze — this interpretive haze — which comes from the materials that are being used. And while they’re extraordinary, I’ve always been interested in describing everything. I think there’s nothing more mysterious than a fact well-described. So now, we can really do that with some of these newer digital cameras. That was just a really attractive notion to me — to get deep into a dark landscape and make it sharp.

“You could argue, to some degree, that the ways in which we’ve seen the South are part of the ways in which we expect to see the South,” she continues. “There’s room for new description, and I wonder if that room isn’t about obscuring, but rather not obscuring. It’s about seeing everything.”

Punctuating the landscape photos are portraits of women — soaking wet, as if they’ve just risen from the waters. “Knoxville Girl” was the first studio portrait Potter made for the series. In it, a girl in a white lace blouse — the kind with round, fabric-covered buttons and permanent creases from years of ironing — wrings out her wet hair with two hands, holding an intense gaze straight at the camera with no hint of mercy. Further into the book, the

lyrics to an old Appalachian murder ballad of the same name suggest the woman’s story: “She fell down on her bended knees / For mercy she did cry / ‘Oh, Willy dear, don’t kill me here / I’m unprepared to die!’” The words are printed in dainty italics, with lines that strike through the violent bits of imagery. Murder ballads are an important part of Dark Waters, and the idea that they would be incorporated into the book was never a question. But partially erasing — or at least obscuring — the violence in the songs dissolves some of their power.

Because it is a book of photography, it was uniquely challenging for Dark Waters to incorporate performance. Still, the tension between Southern landscapes and violent murder ballads was always the crux of the project. Potter braids musical performance throughout the book, beginning with the cover, which shows a drape of heavy green velvet — like a curtain you’d pull back as a performance begins. Photographs of balladeers playing their instruments bookend the series, and you can imagine the curtain opening just as the music starts.

The book ends with a short story by Rebecca Bengal titled “Blood Harmony,” which is every bit as haunting and evocative as the photographs. It’s an afterword that points at a lack of conclusion — like the scene at the end of a horror film that shows that the monster hadn’t really been killed after all, and is going to keep coming back.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

GIRL,” KRISTINE POTTER “DARK WATER,” KRISTINE POTTER

Angela Tucker wants us to understand the complexities of adoption

BY MARIA BROWNING

The title of Angela Tucker’s You Should Be Grateful echoes the misguided comments people sometimes make to adoptees, especially the ones who admit they have mixed emotions about being adopted. Validating the complex, sometimes contradictory feelings of adoptees is a mission for Tucker — one she has pursued through work as a consultant and mentor, as well as in films, a podcast and now this book.

There was so much vulnerability and intense feeling in your quest to find and get to know your birth parents. Was it hard for you to be so open in the book about the difficult emotions involved? I learned about the power of vulnerability after the documentary Closure, which featured the search for my biological parents, came out. The resounding feedback from adoptees was that they felt it gave them permission to search for their biological parents.

The unspoken rule has long been that the only adoptees who search for their birth parents are those who had terrible adoptive parents. My film countered that narrative by showing my adoptive parents supporting me and becoming detectives right alongside me. Given that experience, I felt hopeful that my honesty in the book could provide similar relief or, better yet, provide language for experiences that I know many other adoptees feel.

Tucker has a particular interest in the experiences of transracial adoptees because she’s one herself. Born to a Black mother in Chattanooga in 1985, she was placed in foster care and eventually adopted by a white couple who raised her — along with seven siblings, six of them also adopted — in Bellingham, Wash.

Although Tucker is quick to acknowledge the love and support of her adoptive parents, she’s keenly aware that “being honest about adoption is a tricky minefield to navigate.” By sharing her own story and the stories of other adoptees, she hopes to make the path toward openness and honesty a little easier to follow. Tucker answered questions by email.

If there’s a single takeaway from the book, it seems to be that feelings around adoption are inevitably complicated, and it’s almost impossible to discuss the subject without potentially hurting someone. Why is it so important to talk about it anyway? When we avoid adoption-related conversations because they are complex, we are essentially trying to stay safe and well-liked. Unfortunately, avoidance can also equate to harming someone. The reason the conversation is complex is because it forces us to think about the way we care for certain people and not others. It forces us to think about the reasons we’ve decided some people are unfit and others aren’t.

Avoiding topics of classism, racism and entitlement means we are doomed to continue practices that are harmful to some. While many adoptees have adjusted to their adopted life, 1 in 4 adoptees who seek therapy is contemplating taking their own life. The only way we can work to change this statistic is by talking about why this is happening. We are capable of having complex conversations with compassion, boundaries and empathy. I know we are.

I was a little surprised to learn from the book that many U.S. adoptees still have no legal right to see their original, unredacted birth certificates. Are there policy changes around adoption you’d like to see happen at the national level? It’s quite surprising, huh? Adoptees United is an organization working on this issue. The Adoptee Rights Law Center website shows a map of the country and highlights what current bills are moving through the House or Senate [of each state]. Tennessee is a “compromised” state, which basically means that maybe an adoptee can apply for their original birth certificate, but maybe not. An adoptee would not be able to access the document if a birth parent has vetoed it or an adoptive parent won’t consent. And if it is provided to an adoptee, it could be heavily redacted.

You Should Be Grateful is focused primarily on centering the experiences of adoptees, especially in transracial adoptions, but you advocate strongly for birth mothers, too. What can we do to care for them better, both in terms of cultural awareness and social policy? A language shift is a good place to start. Some birth mothers have advocated for being called first mothers. This is not a unanimous request, but even bringing up the conversation with individuals whose children have been adopted communicates that they have a place in their child’s life.

Policy-wise, we shouldn’t allow any adoption to be closed. I worked with a team to create the Inclusive Family Support Model, which means every adoption can be open. Adoptive parents can create an open relationship with a biological parent who is deceased or unsafe because they’re sharing all of the facts that they know about the parent. Adoptees can handle knowing the truth.

To read an uncut version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee. EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

IT’S A LONG STORY

Werckmeister Harmonies , Trenque Lauquen and the glory of long cinema

BY JASON SHAWHAN

There’s something about longer films that, by nature of the space they take up, allows for more comprehensive and immersive storytelling. Part of it is a mentality — a focus on character and circumstance that can’t be accounted for when higherups are wanting things cut to the bone to fit in more showings per day. But there’s also a promise with longer films that they’ll do things … differently. And that can be refreshing. And invigorating. And Nashville has two very unique opportunities coming up over the next two weeks.

Provided you don’t have a music theory background, Werckmeister Harmonies might fire a few synapses thanks to its two previous one-off local screenings (the first at the Nashville Film Festival back in the glory days, the second at the Belcourt), which lit some cinematic fires and dazzled the eyes and souls of a hundred or so folks. The 2000 feature from Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky was the North American breakthrough for the duo (though Hranitzky’s contribution was never really addressed in English-language press, despite being front-and-center in the Hungarian credits), a remarkable diagram of the ways that fascism and the breakdown of society take hold in a community. It’s become all the more tragically relevant given what Viktor Orbán has done to Hungary in the intervening two decades.

Werckmeister Harmonies is a formalist ritual, its black-and-white long takes effective in their cumulative power — even as they illustrate the swinging-dick

emptiness of so many of the films since then that have used CG imagery and subliminal edits to massage or pad out their long takes. This is, simply, real. Tarr and Hranitzky continue the tradition of Miklós Jancsó, who’d been experimenting with how the single-shot approach changes the way in which audiences process mood and imagery (also with lots of gorgeous naked people). And now, in a stellar 4K restoration from the folks at Janus Films, Nashville viewers can experience the complete film! (Not that it was cut for the U.S., rather that there being only one English-subtitled 35 mm print meant that some moments — and the opening credits — fell away due to splices from the mechanics of exhibition.)

It was Tarr and Hranitzky’s seven-anda-half hour 1994 film Sátántangó that has since become the big one, triumphantly enjoying a proper global release a few years back. But real talk: Werckmeister does everything that Sátántangó does, and does so in two-and-a-half hours. (Also, no questionable sequences involving cats.) Similarly, 2018’s La Flor — an Argentine epic from director Mariano Llinás and the production team El Pampero Cine running just under 14 hours — rightfully got some attention for its ambition (its second section, a musical mystery involving a scorpion cult possibly inspired by singing duo Pimpinela, was one of the most dazzling whatsits of the 2018 festival circuit) and its freewheeling approach to genre and storytelling.

Now, La Flor’s producer Laura Citarella has taken that approach and given us Trenque Lauquen, an expansive (four hours and 20 minutes, nice) but viscerally exciting mystery that traces a disappearance through multiple genres and perspectives — a captivating journey that never bores and never stops reworking and rearranging itself.

You know how people will look at a season of a prestige TV show and say, “That could have been a movie, and it would have worked better”? Well, Trenque Lauquen covers all the plot and all the emotions (and finds the menace at the heart of ’80s MOR), at times feeling like The Saragossa Manuscript as a nighttime soap. It’s an exceptional film, and there’s simply no better way to spend the afternoon of June 18.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES

1

38 Former name of Colombo’s country

39 Fellows

40 California concert site featured in the documentary “Gimme Shelter”

41 Some corp. takeovers

46 Jeannette who was the first woman elected to Congress (1916)

50 “King Lear” son

51 Summer music

53 Some laptops

56 Toe-jam?

patterns, in brief

2 Overflow with

3 Writer Morrison

4 Get in hot water, say

5 N.F.L. cornerback Apple

6 Charitable relief

7 Helicon, e.g., musically speaking

8 Oft-abbreviated Latin phrase

9 Short

10 Colombo’s country, in Olympics shorthand

11 Scammer

12 What the Rays and Jays are in, for short

13 Fresh starts

19 Kind of soup

21 Material that’s bad for the mouth?

25 Drops in the gym?

27 Bench press target

30 Pedigree competitor

31 See 38-Across

35 Ailment treated with a warming compress

36 Not as fierce

42 Hospital diagnostic, for short

43 Fashion designer Rabanne

44 Like an otter’s feet

45 Mark in the World Golf Hall of Fame

57 In ___ (completely)

60 Sign

61 Final number, say

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE

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the undersigned to advertise and sell the property described in and conveyed by said Deed of Trust, all of the said indebtedness having become immediately due and payable by default in the payment of a part thereof, at the option of the owner, this is to give notice that the undersigned will, on June 15, 2023, commencing at 10:30

a.m. at the main north door of the Williamson County Judicial Center, 135 4th Ave South, Franklin, Williamson County, Tennessee 37064 proceed to sell at public outcry to the highest and best bidder for cash, by Trustee’s deed pursuant to the terms and conditions announced at such sale, all of Trustee’s right, title and interest in the following described property situated in Williamson County, State of Tennessee (“Real Estate”), to wit:

LAND SITUATED IN WILLIAMSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE:

A tract of land in the 6th Civil District of Williamson County, Tennessee, being Lots No. 1 and 2, of a subdivision of the P.M. Chaffin Farm, and described as follows:

Beginning with a point in the center of Temple Road in line with the stone wall along Temple’s East boundary line, said point being the same point as the point indicating the Northeast corner of a parcel designated for future development, (adjacent to the Mary L Rudolph property), of Temple Hills Country Club Estates of record in Plat Book 11, Page 136, sheet#3 of 5, Register’s Office of Williamson County, TN, running thence with the center of said road South 80 degrees 15 minutes East 350 feet to an iron pin; thence Southwardly 1555 feet to an iron pin; thence North 60 degrees West 256.0 feet to a corner post in Temple’s East line; thence North 4 degrees East 1455 feet to the point of beginning.

Being the same property conveyed to MS Rochester Close, LLC, a Tennessee limited liability company, by Deed from Katherine Harper Morales, unmarried, dated 02/19/2021 and appearing of record in Book 8433 page 266

Register’s office for Williamson County, Tennessee.

WITH A MUNICIPAL ADDRESS OF 6394 TEMPLE ROAD, FRANKLIN, WILLIAMSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE 37069.

The foregoing shall be sold together with any and all other property, real and personal, which constitutes the Property as that term is defined in the Deed of Trust, but specifically excluding any cash, accounts, deposits, escrows, refunds reserves, impounds and other cash or cash equivalents.

Interested Parties

M5 Rochester Close, LLC Benjamin & Darlys, LLC David Chadwick Taylor The Real Estate will be sold to the highest and best bidder for cash (or for credit against the Obligations if Lender is the highest bidder). All bidders must register at the sale, execute a bidding agreement, and provide the Trustee with a bidder’s deposit of $485,000 by cashier’s or certified check, payable to the Trustee (except for the party secured by the Deed of Trust). The bidding agreement may be obtained in advance of the sale by request to the undersigned. Additional terms may be announced at the sale. The right is hereby reserved to postpone or adjourn this sale, without further publication or notice, by public announcement at the time and place appointed for such sale or for such postponed or adjourned sale. All announcements made at the sale shall take precedence over the terms and conditions of this notice. In said Deed of Trust, Borrower expressly waived the statutory right of redemption, and any and all rights of homestead; dower; all other exemptions and marital rights. Title is believed to be good, but the undersigned will sell and convey only as Trustee. Title is to be conveyed without any covenant or warranty, express or implied, and any matters having priority over the Deed of Trust and matters which may affect or encumber the Property following the sale, such as rights of parties in possession; rights of tenants in possession under unrecorded leases or rental agreements; visible and apparent easements; portion of the property within any roadway; any encroachment, encumbrance, violation, variation, or adverse circumstance affecting the title that would be disclosed by an accurate and complete land survey of the land; all leases, grants, exceptions or reservations

of coal, lignite, oil, gas and other minerals, together with all rights, privileges and immunities relating thereto, appearing in the Public Records; all matters shown on any applicable recorded plat; taxes or assessments that are not shown as existing liens by the records of any taxing authority that levies taxes or assessments on real property or by the public records; proceedings by a public agency that may result in taxes or assessments, or notices of such proceedings, whether or not shown by the records of such agency or by the public records; taxes assessed by correction pursuant to the provisions of T.C.A. §675-603, et seq.; matters that an accurate survey of the premises might disclose; any facts, rights, interests, or claims that are not shown by the public records but that could be ascertained by an inspection of the Property or that may be asserted by persons in possession of the Property; any encroachment, encumbrance, violation, variation, or adverse circumstance affecting the title that would be disclosed by an accurate and complete land survey of the Property and not shown by the public records; any mineral or mineral rights leased, granted or retained by current or prior owners; prior liens, claims and encumbrances including, without limitation, leases and other agreements; assessments, building lines, easements, covenants, and restrictions that may exist; any lien or right to lien for services, labor or material imposed by law and not shown by the public records; and, statutory rights of redemption of any governmental agency including, but not limited to, the right of redemption of the Internal Revenue Service pursuant to 26 U.S.C. §7425(d)(1), of the State of Tennessee pursuant to T.C.A. §67-1-1433(c)(1), or of any other taxing authority.

Joseph R. Prochaska, as agent for Thomas T. Pennington, Trustee Reno & Cavanaugh, PLLC 424 Church Street, Suite 2910 Nashville, TN 37219 Telephone (615) 866-2322

Publication On: May 25, June 1, and June 8, 2023.

Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit

Docket No. 23D298

Rasmieh Mustafa Rahhal vs. Ebrahem Rasoul Thaher

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon Ebrahem Rasoul Thaher. It is ordered that said Defendant enter him appearance herein with thirty (30) days after June 29th 2023 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on July 31st 2023. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk

Bill Riggs, Deputy Clerk

Date: June 2, 2023

L.R.Demarco Attorneys for Plaintiff NSC 6/8, 6/15, 6/22, 6/29/23

Non-Resident Notice

Third Circuit

Docket No. 23D446

JOSHUA RYAN JAMES vs. Lindsay M. James

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon Lindsay M. James. It is ordered that said Defendant enter her appearance herein with thirty (30) days after June 8th 2023, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on July 10th 2023. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk

Bill Riggs, Deputy Clerk

Date: May 11, 2023

Frank E. Mondelli Sr.

Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 5/18, 5/25, 6/1, 6/8/23

Non-Resident Notice

Third Circuit

Docket No. 14D573

Ersel Tim Cooper vs. Connie Sue Cooper

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a nonresident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon Ersel Tim Cooper. It is ordered that said Defendant enter him appearance herein with thirty (30) days after June 15th 2023, same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on July 17th 2023. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Joseph P. Day, Clerk

Bill Riggs, Deputy Clerk

Date: May 18, 2023

Morgan E. Smith

Attorneys for Plaintiff

NSC 5/25, 6/1, 6/8, 6/15/23

Metro Makes a Difference

Notice of Application

The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County is accepting applications for non-profit agencies to participate in the Metro Makes a Difference Campaign. Application may be obtained from: Metro Makes a Difference website: https://www.nashville. gov/de partments/government/ metro-makes-difference

Completed applications can be sent to email address MetroCampaign@uwmn.org.

Deadline for submission: July 3rd, 2023.

The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, color, national origin, religion or disability in admission to, access to, or operations of its programs, services, or activities.

Animal Scientist (Technical Services Sr. Specialist). Interact with multiple customers and perform brief site visits to ensure PIC product performance in breeding herds and growing pigs. Employer: PIC USA, Inc. Job location: Hendersonville, TN headquarters, with extensive travel to and between various unanticipated customer sites required. Mail CV to Karla Herring, PIC USA, Inc., 100 Bluegrass Commons Blvd., Ste. 2200, Hendersonville, TN 37075.

Broadcast Music, Inc., dba BMI. Nashville, TN. Sr. Mainframe Programmer Analyst. Position is 100% remote. Investigate & analyze complex problems &/ or reqs from a bus. perspective & design solutions that align to the business goals & remain w/in tech. guardrails. Req. bachelor’s degree in CIS, comp. engineering or any other engineering field. Min 5 yrs’ mainframe dev. exp. w/ legacy systems & 5 yrs’ strong hands-on exp. in the following tech. areas: DB2 for ZOS; COBOL II; MVS JCL; CICS; TSO/ISPF; Microsoft Office Including Visio. 5 yrs’ exp. w/ royalty distribution systems. 3 yrs of agile / scrum team & Microsoft SQL exp. Strong knowledge of data analysis using SQL, ER diagrams & other tools. Demonstrated exp. in learning new technologies quickly. Expertise mocking up user interface requirements using prototyping. To apply, please visit website at: https:// careers.bmi.com/enUS/job/ mainframeprogrammeranalyst/ J3N1H86GWMCS30 745JF