NATIVE | ISSUE 82 | NASHVILLE, TN by Native

ISSUE 82 JOY WILLIAMS

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Contents Issue 82

The Goods 13 Beer From Here 17 Cocktail of the Month 20 Master Platers 60 You Oughta Know 65 Just Cause

Features 24 The Catbird Seat 34 Joy Williams

44 Literature Spotlight: Mary Laura Philpott 52 Artist Spotlight: Craig Carlisle

52 NATIVE NASHVILLE

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Behind the Issue:

Joy Williams

In the Just Cause section of Issue 81 (featuring May 2016 cover story Mike Floss), we noted that the only two things you can rely on in life are death and taxes. Now, as we put the final touches on Issue 82, that adage seems more applicable than ever. Spring has us reaching for our Flonase, Tax Day looms in the not-so-distant future, and the weather is—as to be expected for this time of year in Tennessee—predictably capricious. In past write-ups, we’ve suggested embracing the kind of change spring symbolizes. After all, it is inevitable, and sometimes even the slightest change—in weather, in what you bring for lunch, in who you spend your time around—can cause an unexpectedly drastic improvement in your life. But this month’s cover story, along with our peek into the ephemeral dining experience that is The Catbird Seat, our Artist Spotlight on painter Craig Carlisle, and our Literature Spotlight on writer/ speaker Mary Laura Philpott, has us thinking a little differently about change. Yes, like death and taxes, you can’t avoid change. Yes, that change will probably come with its share of growing pains. However, that doesn’t mean you have to become something you’re not. You can, to lift a phrase from the immortal David Bowie,

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HANNAH LOVELL COURTNEY SPENCER

“Hang On To Yourself” when everything around you seems new and exciting yet scary. You can take your hard-won culinary vision—a vision that was crafted in kitchens around the world— and bring it to a city you just moved to; you can, in the aftermath of a friend’s untimely passing, use the impact that friend had on you as a catalyst for new art; you can help other people feel less hopeless by describing a time you felt hopeless. And finally, you can look to the things you knew—your home, your sound, your loved ones—before the “big change” in your life for inspiration, even if those things or people aren’t there anymore. We won’t spoil any more of this issue for you, because we want you to read and see these stories of change for yourself. We just want to send a gentle reminder that you—in your current state, warts and hangups and trauma and all—are worth holding onto no matter what’s going on around you. And, on a lighter note, we’d like to thank Austin Lord for shooting a collection of beautiful Joy Williams portraits (good to have you back in the saddle, buddy) and Chris Parton for his usual grade-A profile writing chops. Check out that cover story on page 34, and keep in mind that they don’t make ‘em like you anymore—as a matter of fact, they never have and they never will.

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with Kyle Cooke writer at NATIVE Beer Name: Brutiful Beast Brewery: Jackalope Brewing Company Style:  Brut IPA ABV: 5.5% Food Pairing: Capunti pasta with herbs, Meyer lemon, and peas Appearance: Light gold Aroma: Citrusy and floral Where to Find It: Jackalope’s two locations: The Den or The Ranch Overall Takeaways: Last week I was reading on my sofa when I heard my upstairs neighbor begin to tune his guitar on the balcony, causing the dog next door to go absolutely nuts. The discordant jam sesh means only one thing: spring is officially here. Unlike my “Wonderwall”-singing neighbor (lucky me), my favorite lazy springtime activity is to enjoy a beer with dinner at the small bistro set we have on our balcony. For my most recent dinner, I tried Jackalope Brewing Company’s Brutiful Beast, a champagne-inspired IPA. It’s the perfect beer to ring in the new season, because like champagne, it’s crisp, fruit-forward, and refreshingly drinkable. Brutiful Beast is brewed with Citra and Amarillo hops, hence the beer’s citrusy and floral aroma and taste. The beer is light gold, almost pale yellow in color, so much so that if you were to serve it in a champagne flute it would look a whole lot like everyone’s favorite aperitif. Of course, that is by design. Just like champagne, Brutiful Beast has a very dry finish that begs you to keep sipping. I paired this beer with a fitting spring dish: capunti pasta with fresh herbs, Meyer lemon, and peas. The beer’s citrus notes worked nicely with the sweet, less intense acidity of the Meyer lemon. The pasta’s fresh herbs—parsley, basil, mint, and chives—provided a cooling effect on the palate that was welcome on a sunny evening. Not unlike this spring season, brut IPAs are in their infancy. Kim Sturdavant, brewmaster at San Francisco’s Social Kitchen and Brewery, is credited with brewing the first brut IPA in 2017. Renowned breweries like Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada soon followed suit, and now you can find the newfangled IPA at breweries all across the country. Cheers to that.

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La Frontera

BY MICHAEL MCCOLLUM BARTENDER AT ATTABOY NASHVILLE

PHOTO BY GABRIEL MAX STARNER STYLING BY HEATHER HAYDEN

THE GOODS 1 oz fresh lime juice 1/2 oz simple syrup 1/2 oz Aperol 1 1/2 oz Fino Sherry

DIRECTIONS Combine all ingredients in a shaker. Shake, pour into a Collins glass and top with soda water. Garnish with a cucumber slice.

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MASTER PL ATERS

BY LOUISA SHAFIA AUTHOR OF LUCID FOOD: COOKING FOR AN ECO-CONSCIOUS LIFE PHOTOS BY DANIELLE ATKINS

Date Shake with Toasted Nuts Majoon

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Makes 3 1/2 cups

THE GOODS FOR THE SHAKE:

1 banana, peeled and frozen 8 Medjool dates, pitted 1/2 cup plain yogurt (not thick) 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract pinch of ground cinnamon pinch of sea salt 2 cups ice cubes 3/4â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1 cup water FOR THE TOPPING:

1 tbsp toasted unsweetened coconut flakes 1 tbsp toasted almonds, coarsely chopped 1 tbsp toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped 1 tbsp toasted pistachios, â&#x20AC;&#x192; coarsely chopped 1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds

DIRECTIONS Cut the banana into 1-inch slices and add the slices to a blender. Add the dates, yogurt, vanilla, cinnamon, salt, ice cubes, and 3/4 cup water. Blend until smooth. Add an additional 1/4 cup water if the shake is too thick. Pour into glasses and top with rows of coconut flakes, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and sesame seeds, and serve.

Reprinted with permission from The New Persian Kitchen by Louisa Shafia, published by Ten Speed Press.

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FLYING HIGH AGAIN

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by JONAH ELLER-ISAACS photos EMILY DORIO

The Catbird Seat, Nashville’s home for avant-garde cooking, resets every two years, bringing on new head chefs and new concepts. This time, Will Aghajanian and Liz Johnson are here to share their dynamic culinary vision with our city’s luckiest diners NATIVE NASHVILLE

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LIKE THE NORTHERN MOCKINGBIRD, THE CATBIRD CAN

reproduce sounds of other species with remarkable accuracy. Its call features chirps, gurgles, bits of other birds’ songs, and a throaty mewling, which sort of sounds like a cat if you have a potent imagination. To amplify its call, the catbird leaves the thicket, where it spends most of its time, and climbs to the top of a tree branch or bush. The bird’s tendency to seek higher ground led to the 19th-century Southern colloquialism sitting in the catbird seat , describing someone in a place of power, cozy in the sweet spot, high above the concerns of the day. There’s nowhere to hide, out on that branch. And there’s nowhere to hide at The Catbird Seat, Nashville’s legendary home for bleeding-edge cuisine since 2011. Twenty-two seats perch above a sunken kitchen. Cooking here is not for the meek. And for those select chefs lucky enough to get the gig, adapting to this high-pressure environment means moving on. That’s because Catbird is a chef incubator, and its ephemeral nature is central to the business model. Working with Strategic Hospitality ownership group, founding chefs Josh Habiger and Erik Anderson opened the restaurant in October 2011 and departed, as planned, two years later. Most recently, Ryan Poli led The Catbird Seat to great acclaim, netting the prestigious Five Diamond Award from American Automobile Association. “Ryan and his team have really reached the apex in this past year,” notes Max Goldberg, co-owner of Strategic Hospitality. “And that’s how we know it’s time for the next round.” A fresh crew of culinary wizards have arrived to hone their craft in the Catbird crucible: Will Aghajanian is the new head chef and Liz Johnson is pastry chef, but those job descriptions don’t begin to cover the breadth of their authority. When The Catbird Seat hits reset, it’s not just the menu that gets a redesign. I meet the chefs at Patterson House, the floor below Catbird. It’s many hours before either is open to the public, and midday sun is streaming in after many days of rain. There’s an unearthly glow in this usually dark and cozy spot. Thinking about the building’s small footprint, I’m curious what kind of changes are possible in such a tight space upstairs.. “We did a lot of work with light,” Johnson tells me, alluding to work from local installation artist Jonny Kingsbury. “There’s a lot of light installations. I don’t want to ruin it for you too much before you see it!” Aghajanian adds, “Our counter is made of leather now. A lot of different artisans from all over helped us out. Some of the plates are made for dishes specifically.” Aghajanian and Johnson’s creative vision reaches far beyond the food. Everything is in play: seat layouts, the seats themselves, dinnerware, flatware,

even the restroom. “We transformed everything!” Johnson points out enthusiastically. “We tried not to overlook anything. There’s a lot of little things that’ll be different.” It’s an unusual arrangement, this cyclical, planned turnover, and I wonder aloud if that affects the creative process. “I’ve never reopened a restaurant,” Johnson replies. “I’ve only opened new ones. So this is our first experience of that—but we tried to treat it as if it was a brand-new restaurant.” The pair moved to Nashville to open/reopen The Catbird Seat after time in some of the most influential kitchens around the globe, the kind of places people save up for years to visit. One of those places was Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant famous for defining New Nordic cuisine. It’s where Aghajanian and Johnson met, and previous Catbird chefs Poli, Anderson, and Trevor Moran all had stints in the Noma kitchen. Will Aghajanian’s fine dining experience began in his hometown of Washington, DC, working with Eric Ziebold at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s restaurant CityZen. They were formative years for the young chef. “It was very classic training. He was the chef de cuisine at French Laundry for a long time. It gave me a respect for that kind of cooking, using classic sauces, that world.” Aghajanian also spent time at more avantgarde spots like Mugaritz in Spain and Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York. “I like having some elements of classic cooking that maybe are forgotten,” Aghajanian explains, “but maybe not as heavy as they would be classically. Maybe we lighten them up in some form.” Liz Johnson found her way to fine dining through her relentless drive. At sixteen, Johnson graduated high school early so she could follow her passion for the craft. She started culinary courses at Schenectady County Community College but graduated from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. “I enjoy cooking because of the craft of it,” Johnson says excitedly. “I could cook all day and then go home and cook at my house. It’s just something that I really enjoy doing. And if I don’t, I kinda go crazy. Like, I have to cook. I get cranky. I just love to cook.” After CIA, Johnson ended up at Toro, a Boston tapas bar, and a few years later she was staging at Noma. Once together—and they are together together, as in engaged—the duo opened their first restaurant, Mimi, in Greenwich Village. In their own kitchen, they pursued Aghajanian’s vision of bringing lightness and mystery to traditional French classics. Mimi became a destination. Pete Wells, the legendary New York Times food critic, called it “the French bistro New Yorkers dream of finding in Greenwich Village.” So what’s the duo’s vision for Catbird Seat? Aghajanian mentions an “end goal” for their NATIVE NASHVILLE

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partnership, and I ask how close The Catbird Seat is to that end. “I think the visual aesthetic is similar,” he answers, but adds that ultimately, he’d like to be “surrounded by water and sea and mountains. Have all of it.” Even with Tennessee’s landlocked-ness, their Catbird is closer to that end goal. “It’s definitely the closest we’ve been so far to it, which is pretty cool,” Aghajanian adds. “We can do food that we want to serve and be confident.” ---------------Reopening a restaurant hasn’t given the duo much time to explore in the three months they’ve been here. “Oh yeah, we’re working seven days a week,” Johnson confirms. “It’s all good though! We’re living on cold brew.” The restaurant they love so far? Waffle House; it’s open after Catbird shuts down each night. “Shout-out to Miss Carla! Goodlettsville Waffle House!” Johnson shouts gleefully. Even with their limited exposure, the pair appreciate the warmth and friendliness of the Nashvillians they’ve encountered, from Miss Carla to their fellow restaurateurs. “People here are really just so gracious and hospitable,” Johnson remarks. “It’s just something that’s in their culture. And I’m from New York, Will’s from DC . . . That doesn’t really exist there. Like whatsoever.” “Everybody’s very helpful here,” Aghajanian adds with a smile. “In a lot of other places, it’s more cutthroat. Everybody has their secret purveyors for things, and they’re not gonna tell you. And here, everybody’s, ‘Oh, you know, my mom raises chickens, I’ll bring her eggs,’ or, ‘Here’s this farm where we get this thing from.’ All the chefs are very friendly and accommodating.” Aghajanian also mentions that elsewhere, he’s experienced people coming to dinner ready, excited even, to hate everything. Thankfully, that’s been rare so far. That doesn’t mean there aren’t detractors. Aghajanian, Johnson, and I share a good laugh about some of the more colorful Yelp reviews. They clearly have thick skin. You’d have to, in such an intimate space. “Everything’s heightened. Everything’s on display. You have to really be on point all the time,” Johnson shares. “Everything is immediate. If someone doesn’t like something, or if someone really likes something—hopefully the latter!—they’re gonna tell you right away.” ---------------------A few days after my conversation with the chefs, I’m back at The Catbird Seat’s door, tucked under the Patterson House stairs. I understand Chef Johnson’s

inclination to leave the space undescribed. However, I’m also aware that the price tag ($125 for the tasting menu) puts the meal out of reach for some, so I’ll try to do my best without spoiling the surprise. The door opens at 8:30 sharp. They’re ready for the night’s second seating. It’s all hazy inside: a cone of blue laser light shimmering through the fog is the only light source. Darkness plus bright laser. My eyes are struggling to adjust, like being inside a James Turrell art installation. We’re waving our hands through the cone and giggling, teenagers on acid. An attendant guides us to an elevator bathed in red. We go up a floor, down a darkened hallway, and into the light. After all the dark, entering the restaurant’s brightness warps my vision again. There’s a lowslung, angular ceiling, and white light emanates from atop the sunken kitchen, giving a full view of the sparsely decorated room. Who needs art on the walls? The food itself is art. We run our hands along the red leather that stretches across the counter we’ll all share as the serving surface. It’s imperfect, distressed, but smooth and soft: damaged leftovers of Hermès Birkin bags, as the staff later shares. We’re handed hot towels, smelling of something earthy, a scent that Johnson jokes “starts with an R? Ravenclaw?” Without being served a thing, we’ve already been through so much olfactory stimulation. And then the tasting menu starts to arrive. We begin with a quince fritter topped with paperthin slices of smoked beef tongue. I’ve enjoyed lengua tacos for years and this is a totally different beast (but, y’know, the same beast). The shavings melt away in my mouth before the fritter’s sweet-salty crunch kicks in. I’ve added a non-alcoholic beverage pairing, which begins with a black tea with hops. It blends wonderfully with the next dish of kiwi and avocado. The fruits are aerated with a spritz of herbaceous gin on a plate that initially looks black, but the color changes as I move the bright green slices around. The “black” plate is actually white—it’s just coated with finely ground roasted seaweed. Each dish is a marvel; and I mean the dishes themselves that cradle each masterfully prepared course. As we move through the meal, the staff lays out the odd shapes around their prep space. I can’t guess which are built custom; it could be all of them. A stemless glass goblet holds one of the most unique things to ever enter my mouth: Banana Bavarian, creamy and tropical, alongside a glob of uni (sea urchin), topped with a bruleed crackly layer of lemongrass toffee and a dusting of black truffle. All told, we will taste fourteen dishes spread across more than three hours. Throughout the night, Aghajanian and Johnson check in as they’re able, but NATIVE NASHVILLE

they’ve got work to do. Everyone is cross-trained, so service arrives in a myriad of hands. Watching the staff, it’s remarkable how much they’re able to accomplish in the narrow galley. It requires a wide-open sociability, balletic grace, and a thoughtful economy of movement—even more so when it’s six or seven nights a week. A chef takes what I’m certain is a very, very sharp knife to a chunk of aged marlin belly, coming away with slices so thin they might blow away on a breeze. Catbird cures the marlin themselves before sending it into storage shared with country hams, where it hangs for a month. It’s like a hog and a marlin had a baby. A delicious, smoky baby. The sashimi slicer laughs and shares its nickname, “the Tennessee hamfish.” I recall a comment from Aghajanian during our earlier conversation. “I like making things better . . . It starts here and then three weeks later, it evolves, and it gets better and more pure, more like, I can taste this piece of fish. Now this piece of fish is delicious.” Two desserts complete our tasting adventure. There’s a baked potato ice cream, made in the Turkish style with salep, or powdered wild orchid root, which makes it super stretchy. Its loops and whorls are topped with crispy potato skins and burnt juniper resin. The next plate over is frozen guava with sea water meringue and black olive. The piercing tartness of guava meeting the blissfully delicate wisp of meringue is the perfect end to the night. It’s like the last track on your favorite album, the one that’s sweet and a little sad. The one that tugs at your heartstrings and lifts you up. The one that’s melancholy and triumphant, with a wandering melody like birdsong—or a cat if you use a little imagination.

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Home Sweet Home Joy Williams returns to Nashville and to a timeless sound by CHRIS PARTON photos AUSTIN LORD

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IT’S A STORYBOOK SPRING DAY IN NASHVILLE —

right in the sweet spot between changing the clocks and the pollen apocalypse—and Joy Williams is thinking about what it means to be home. It’s going on five years since her Grammy-winning folk duo The Civil Wars marched off the battlefield for good, but now she’s back in Nashville and back to her old ways, ready for the May 3 release of her new album Front Porch. Fueled by ha rd- ea r ned w isdom but defined by the inviting, down-toearth nature of so many front-porch conversations, the set really does mark a return home for Williams—and for her, it’s one that was almost completely unexpected. “Coming back to Nashville felt like finally being able to admit this is home,” says the Northern California native, relaxing after a photo shoot as birds chirp happily behind her. “Even though I’d lived here going on eighteen years, just with travel and being in Los Angeles while my dad was sick and I was making [2015’s] Venus, I always sort of had my eyes set on the West Coast.” Venus, Williams’ first post–Civil Wars album, was epically ambitious and lightyears removed from the preindustrial tenor of The Civil Wars. The record’s sweeping sonic expanse was grandiose—and thoroughly modern. But with Front Porch, Williams kicks off her shoes and gets back to basics. Back to the richly textured mix of light and dark sounds. Back to feet-onthe-ground themes, striking vocals, and a timeless sense of artistic ease. In short, she’s back to feeling like herself. “When I made Venus, I was healing so much from what happened in The Civil Wars that I was not ready to own my portion of that sound yet,” she admits. “It took me time, but [ Front Porch] feels like taking that sound in my backpack and carrying it to a new place. People who listen will say, ‘Yeah, I can hear a bit of The

Civil Wars in this,’ and that’s great. Now I don’t have to feel anything other than I’m very proud of the music I made in that duo.” Produced by The Milk Carton Kids’ Kenneth Pattengale and recorded at House of Blues Studios in Nashville, that new place is close to everything that matters for Williams. Nothing feels forced, nothing feels too perfect, and Williams’ songbird vocals are in career-best form. But it was actually born from layers of tragedy. Soon after The Civil Wars broke up Williams retreated to L.A., hoping to convalesce personally but also to take care of her father, who was fighting cancer. She wrote and recorded Venus, but that felt like an attempt to prove she still had more in her artistic tank. Once her dad passed, she looked around and suddenly felt out of place. “It was really like, ‘Why am I here?’” she explains. “I started to realize that I missed home, and I didn’t mean Santa Cruz—I meant Nashville. There was something about this town that brought about these feelings of rootedness. And I think when you lose someone you love, it makes you reprioritize. There was a simplifying effect happening in my life, so that sense of a ‘front porch’ felt like a really good place to land.” Along with her husband and young son, she picked up and moved to 12 South, and while the “front porch” theme of the album didn’t yet exist, the pull on her soul did. A front porch is a place of welcoming, she says, and also a place of goodbyes. It’s a place of family and a place to slow down and reconnect the dots of life. After rising to stardom, watching it fade away, then dealing with such a profound loss, that’s what she needed. “I think in my twenties I was all about What’s the next big thing?” she says. “And in this season of my life it was more like finding the rainbow in the dish bubble.

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That’s where the whole idea came from.” With her feelings sorted out, Williams took a simple touchstone into writing sessions with some of Nashville’s most sought-after tunesmiths. Working with a female-heavy cast of hitmakers like Liz Rose, Natalie Hemby, Caitlyn Smith, Emily Shackelton and more, she kept saying, “If I can’t sing it on my front porch, it’s probably not for me.” Rose came up with the obvious question: “Well, have you written a song called ‘Front Porch’ yet?” With its serene acoustic melody and siren-call message of belonging, the track is a gorgeous highlight on an album full of emotional standouts, embedding multiple layers of personal meaning inside four brisk minutes. “The light is on, what you waitin’ for / Come on back, to the front porch,” Williams coos in the chill-bump-inducing chorus. “I likened the songwriting process to farming,” she says. “It was like, ‘Well, I’ll wait until the right season with the particular writers I want to write with,’ and I would just show up that day with the seed of what I was hoping to write about. You don’t know how any one of them is going to grow, but over time I got to look back on this row of things that seemed to be in the same vein. It felt intentional but not controllable.” The album kicks off with a thematic outlier. “Canary” was written “during a heightened political moment in time,” Williams explains, but while the song rejects the politics of division, it’s not an anti-Trump manifesto. Instead, she uses the image of a canary in a coal mine to describe what she feels is her role as a mother. “For me it was like, My God, we must keep telling the truth . We must stay connected and look out for one another, and that image came to mind,” she explains. “Some people have told me, ‘You do know the canary has to die in order

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for people to realize something is wrong, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Just let me go with metaphor for a second, alright?’” Elsewhere Williams tributes her late father with the gentle sway of “Preacher’s Daughter.” Delicate and loving, but also boldly honest about their differences, it wasn’t the first time she had tried to write about her dad—but it was the first time she felt safe enough to tell the truth. “Like his will I would not bend / I guess I got my nerve from him,” she wrote with Rose and Hemby. “To this day I still cannot sing it live without crying,” Williams admits. Mea nwhile, “ The Trouble With Wanting” presents a mindful-but-catchy anthem to human folly—the song is inspired by our tendency to focus on what we don’t have—and Williams tactfully addresses letting go in the stark “When Does the Heart Move On.” Trying hard to avoid bitterness in favor of compassion, the track was written about a friend’s on-again-off-again relationship— not The Civil Wars splitting up—but the parallels are obvious enough. Moving on “can be like walking down a long hallway of razor blades and trying not to get cut,” she admits. Pushing through what sounds like a real lump in her throat, Williams quietly transmits her heartbreak into song.“We both know you’re not coming home,” she sings. That feeling of raw, in-the-moment emotion is everywhere on Front Porch , and it’s not an accident. Williams wanted a producer who would listen closely to the songs and let them breathe, and she found that in Kenneth Pattengale. He assembled a studio team of less-is-more A-listers including Russ Pahl, Scott Mulvahill, Caitlin Canty, Anthony da Costa, and more, and he focused on recording each track in one complete take—rather than splicing in the best moments from multiple tries. Twelve loose, beautifully unguarded keepers emerged, with a noticeable live feel that perfectly complements Williams’

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Front Porch theme. And in a way, her return to an edgy-roots sound was unavoidable. Williams had just found out she was pregnant with her second child—a daughter—so she essentially just “sat on a stool and sang the songs,” because that’s about all she was capable of at the time. “I am not a roses-and-unicorns kind of pregnant girl,” she says with a laugh. “I’m like sick all day and very vomitous. But it was like I couldn’t help myself. I knew it was time to make this record and I was like, ‘You know what, this nausea and fatigue will help keep me really honest, so why not?’ “I’ve always been really heartforward with making things anyway,” she continues. “But I’m also a recovering perfectionist and that’s been a lifelong process for me, so I enjoyed letting go on this . . . I’m not giving so much of a shit about how perfectly it comes across. I wanted it to be excellent, but not precious, and it was the most effortless experience I’ve ever had in a studio—and that’s saying a lot considering how much I wanted to barf.” The album closes with thick, uplifting gospel harmony, fingerpicked guitar, and a well-deserved glance in the rearview mirror. “Look How Far We’ve Come” is the shortest track on the record, but that’s not to say it’s any less meaningful. It’s an abstract map of the road that led Williams back home—with all its blind curves and picturesque views included. But like any real road, this one doesn’t stop at her front porch. “I feel old and young at the same time,” she says, pausing to consider the gravity of that statement. “I’ve been in this industry since I was seventeen and I’m thirty-six now. That’s more than a hot minute, and I’ve experienced a lot of things—some I’m really proud of and a lot that were really hard . . . Front Porch sounds very much like I’m home, and I don’t imagine myself veering off into space again anytime soon, but I think I still have a lot to learn.” Front Porch is available May 3.

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Literature Spotlight: Mary Laura Philpott illustrations COURTNEY SPENCER

Contrary to what the New York Dolls said in 1973, personality crises are not hot. Searching for identity or struggling to love the “new” or “old” you is tough—especially when you’re a kid. The “journey,” as people insist on calling it, inevitably comes with anxiety, ambiguity, and anger. In hindsight, we can recognize these emotions as natural, or even essential, to our development as people. But that’s pretty cold comfort to a pissed off and confused seven-year-old. Mary Laura Philpott understands this. In her new memoir-in-essays, I Miss You When I Blink, the local editor (she founded MUSING, the digital magazine published by Parnassus Books) and general local lit person (she’s cohost on Nashville Public Television’s A Word on Words) waxes poetic about her life as a “type-A overachiever who checks all the boxes she thought she needed to feel like a happy, successful adult, but who eventually finds herself feeling lost, anxious, and in need of reinvention.” If that sounds familiar, it probably means you’re human. And if you’re human, you’ll more than likely relate to the essays in I Miss You When I Blink, available now via Atria Books. There’s no promise they’ll make you love or understand that paradoxical entity that is you, but they might make you laugh and feel a little less alone as you navigate this thing called life.

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The following is an excerpt from “Mermaids and Destiny,” one of the essays featured in Philpott’s I Miss You When I Blink. Every now and then, a school will ask me to come speak to a group of students, and each time I do it, I get a little nervous. I always wonder what I might possibly have to say that teenagers want to hear. When I ask teachers what they expect me to talk about, they say, “Tell them about your life path, your career.” I suppose this is because the job market is garbage these days and kids need to know there are lots of ways to make a living, even by cobbling together a hodgepodge of part-time jobs and creative projects. I’m not sure, but I want to prove myself worthy of the invitation, so I try to leave them with something useful. I start by showing a picture of myself in second grade: In the photo, I’m caught mid-jump, throwing a basketball that’s clearly headed about two feet short of the basket. I’m wearing soccer cleats (to play basketball) with a T-shirt tucked snugly into the elastic waist of my shorts, just under my armpits. I’m grinning like I think I’m really nailing it, and my hair is tied with white bows in two pigtails. “You might look at this and assume I’d grow up to be a professional athlete,” I begin. “But life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect.” Gets a laugh every time. Whether you think you know exactly who you’ll become or you have absolutely no idea, I tell them, one thing is true for everyone, for better or for worse: Life will surprise you. You’ll hit dead ends and detours. There will be times when you can’t fathom what comes next. When that happens, remember yourself as you are right now. Remember yourself as you were when you were even younger. Who were you when you weren’t wondering who you were? Here’s who I was. I was seven, I was bored, and I had already pillaged our living room bookshelves for everything except the Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steel, which I couldn’t reach. So I grabbed what was left: a dusty, leather-bound book of short stories by Hans Christian Andersen. It fell open to “The Little Mermaid.” This was the first I had heard of mermaids (the book came into my life before the movie), and the opening conversation between a bevy of teenage mermaid sisters and their grandmother hooked me immediately. The youngest sister, who has just witnessed a shipwreck and helped a drowning

human prince to shore, wants to know: How long do humans live? How long do mermaids live? What happens when you die? (You can see how it appealed to a seven-year-old.) Mermaids, according to the grandmother, live for three hundred years. Humans live a shorter time, but when they die, their souls live on forever. Not so for mermaids. “Is there anything I can do to get an immortal soul?” the mermaid asks. Not much, the grandmother answers. You’d have to marry a human, but that’s darn near impossible, because mermaids can’t walk on land. Tough tail fins, sister. Among the many ways the original short story differs from the cartoon film (see also: singing crabs, oyster-shell bikinis), there is one whopper of a distinction, and you get a hint of it in this line: “She could not forget the charming prince, nor her sorrow that she had not an immortal soul like his.” See, in the story, the little mermaid thinks the prince is cute, but she doesn’t decide to go back out to the beach looking for him because he’s so irresistible. She goes back because she wants a soul. The way I read it, she’s not lovesick. She’s ambitious. But to get what she wants, she has to strike a raw deal with a bad witch and trade away her voice for feet. Then everything goes wrong. Once on land, she can’t tell anyone who she is or what she needs— she can’t say anything—and she ends up standing mutely by as the prince meets and marries someone else. The real bummer is that, according to the witchy bargain, she can’t cut her losses, grow her tail back, and revert to mermaid life. Failing to seal the deal means she is doomed to die. After the prince and his new bride are married on the deck of a grand ship, the mermaid-turned-human stays up all night gazing out at the waves because she knows she won’t live past sunrise. Then, just before morning, she sees her sisters rise to the surface, waving frantically. It turns out that in this bizarre underwater commerce where you can buy magic with your body parts, they’ve traded their long, beautiful seaweed hair for one last out. There’s a way the little mermaid can save herself: “The witch has given us a knife,” they say. “Before the sun rises, you must plunge it into the heart of the prince. When his warm blood falls upon your feet, they will grow together again, and you will once more be a mermaid. Or in a few minutes the sun will rise, and you must die.” Kill or be killed. Your classic Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep blue sea. That’s a bit darker than the animated movie. The little mermaid takes the knife. She sneaks

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into the ship’s honeymoon suite. She raises the blade over the sleeping prince, poised to stab him . . . and she can’t do it. She drops the knife and leaves the room, then slips over the rail of the ship and into the water, where she dissolves into sea foam. She has lost her remaining 285 mermaid years; she has lost her brief humanity; and, most tragically, she has lost what she gambled everything for—a chance at a soul. It’s all over. Holy hammerheads, that story made me mad. I read and reread it until my thumbs wore the print off the pages, desperate to find the loophole, some way it could all end differently. What could the mermaid have done to turn things around, to get everyone’s attention and explain herself before it was too late? I mean, good grief, couldn’t she have written a simple note? My God, couldn’t she? I obsessed over this fictional dilemma for years. As unlikely as it may seem that a seven-year-old would fall asleep raging against Neptune, plotting undersea education reform, I was stuck on it. I couldn’t decide whom I was angrier at: the fictional mermaid population for not developing some sort of alphabet or sign language, or Hans Christian Andersen for leaving such a ridiculous hole in the story. It was so unfair—so stupid—that the sea-girl couldn’t write her way out of trouble. When I think about that mermaid now, I think about the things people trade away to get something else.

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I think about what other girls suffer, girls who live not under the sea, but in places where the deck is stacked against females from the start, cities where it’s not safe to walk to school, countries where young women are forced to marry against their will. I think of the lengths some women must go to in order to protect their own lives. I think about my daughter, my friends’ daughters, girls growing up in America at a time when the word feminist is fashionable again, and girls growing up in places where feminism has not even broken through to the surface. I think about people who can’t ask for what they need, and also people who just think they can’t. I think about how sometimes we hesitate to speak up out of fear of being seen as selfish or greedy. Imagine the lives we’d live if we were all able to say what we wanted out loud, or put it on paper if necessary. And as I reflect on my imaginary mermaid friend who lacked the skills to save herself, I also think about what that story taught me—and I don’t mean the contrived moral tacked onto the end of the fairy tale; I mean the lesson I took away from it and carried with me forever. Baby, you better learn to write.

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KAREN ELSON Mother. Musician. Muse. WTLB: Kill them with kindness PASSION: Putting a struggle into a song

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Artist Spotlight: CRAIG CARLISLE photos SARAH B GILLIAM

I went out to Craig Carlisle’s farm studio specifically to see his Letters to a Friend paintings. I don’t know how I knew about them, or how I knew I needed to see them in person, but there we were in his bright barn studio on a 19th-century farm south of Nashville, pulling giant paintings out of his storage racks. While they share a gene pool with the work for which Carlisle is known—large heads, fanciful, sprightly demigods—the Letters are distinctly unified and deeply personal. As a painter, you might try to remember what drew you to painting all those years ago: the smell of paint or the thrill of watching colors mix, the fantasy of make-believe, the satisfaction of realistic portrayal, or the infinite potential of a blank surface before the first mark. Decades into the profession, you may be accustomed to/resigned to/comfortable with (the latter being the least likely) seeing your paintings as a commodity; they are shown, marketed and collected, and it’s an honest living.  Then a friend dies. And when you go back into the studio, something new appears. If our paintings function as communication, and communication changes as our lives change, then new life experiences should cause a shift in our paintings. Such is the case with Letters to a Friend. The day he moved into this studio, Carlisle’s best friend of a quartercentury died suddenly. The same day, he began what would become this series. The texts and images in these works might be seen as a call-andresponse between Carlisle and his friend, who was devoted to Paris, and wherever he is now, Carlisle says, he is surely speaking French. Even as these paintings are a response to loss and bereavement, they are colorful and varied, even playful. Some are nocturnal, but most are bright like the morning, suffused with airy text, not dense volumes. There are disembodied limbs—not the horrors of Goya, but hopeful, prayerful arms and legs of Milagros. They are primitive, preverbal signals of humanity. Touch. Intimacy. Above all, they are markers of vulnerability. It is tempting to try to decode symbolism, to cinch a painting up into a good, single, tangible meaning. But the job of the artist, which Carlisle has taken up fully with this series, is to respond in-kind to life’s inexhaustible and often beautifully unresolvable questions. —Noah Saterstrom, Guest Curator at Julia Martin Gallery Letters to a Friend will show in two consecutive monthlong exhibitions at the Julia Martin Gallery from April 6 to May 25.

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YOU OUGHTA KNOW:

Lucy DK by NATIVE STAFF

photos EMILY DORIO

By this point, just about every local with ears and a Wi-Fi connection knows that Nashville is not just country music. We’re home to rich Americana, garage rock, and, most recently, pop scenes, the likes of which are being recognized the world over (just flip on Fallon, or, ya know, the Grammys sometime). However, just because we’re recognized globally doesn’t mean we’re necessarily in step with what’s happening globally. Case in point: in recent years, acts like Dua Lipa, Jorja Smith, and Kali Uchis have made names for themselves by bringing traditionally marginalized voices to the forefront of pop. These are women of color with distinctly un-American takes—folks that bring a fresh perspective to common themes (love, breakups, etc.) by simple virtue of not being white girls from Franklin with a Martin D-28. So where do we find these voices in Nashville? Look no further than Nashville-by-way-of Leicester, England, artist Lucy DK. Since moving to town in 2015, DK (short for Davies-Kumadiro) has released a solid stream of singles that will likely land with fans of Unplugged-era Lauryn Hill, Bjork, and the aforementioned international artists. DK makes smart, multilayered pop that sinks its teeth into familiar subject matter—homesick sickness, lost love—only to subvert the expectations surrounding these well-trodden issues. Take 2018’s “Drama” as a case study. Here, DK introduces an ex who, mid-breakup, accuses her of being prone to hysteria. By the end of the song, however, we realize that DK’s simply confronting an issue that was caused by (shocker) the guy’s bad behavior. If there is any “drama” present, it’s probably because the guy is a dismissive and insecure asshole, not because DK is the dreaded “psycho” girlfriend. It’s a welcome break from breakup tunes plagued by guilt and longing, and we can’t wait to hear more. For her favorite local hang, DK picked Santa’s Pub, a spot that is appropriately drama-free. “Santa’s provides the bizarre night out I never knew I needed,” she explains. “It’s Christmas-themed all year round, and there’s karaoke. It’s genius. I want to take the business idea home with me to England.” Father Christmas’ Pub, anyone?

Lucy DK’s latest single, “Beth’s in China,” is out now.

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For more information or tickets, please call 615.292.7766

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JUST CAUSE:

with Brooke Allison by NATIVE STAFF illustrations COURTNEY SPENCER

In Just Cause, NATIVE checks in with musicians, artists, writers, chefs, and pretty much anyone else who has appeared in the magazine to see what they’re up to these days. We also ask about their favorite local nonprofit or charity. This month, we’re checking in with Brooke Allison, who appeared in NATIVE in September 2014.

If you don’t know Brooke Allison, you know her businesses. Since appearing in NATIVE four and a half years ago, the Nashville-by-wayof-Seattle entrepreneur has opened five Scout’s Barbershop locations and doubled the size of Hot Yoga East Nashville, her first local business venture. Currently, she’s got plans for a sixth Scout’s location (coming to downtown in late 2019), and on May 4, she’ll open the 5 String Garage, a bluegrass-forward coffee shop, bar, and restaurant in Old Hickory which she says is her dad’s retirement project. Oh, did we also mention she’s a geologist by trade? If this is what hot yoga does for your productivity, maybe we should give it a try. But near-inhuman work ethic and an aptitude for expansion aren’t the most notable things about Allison. What sets her apart from other industrious t r a nspla nts is her u nw aver ing dedication to impacting Nashville through her businesses. At the hands of Allison, yoga studios and barbershops become more than just places to perfect your tree pose or get an affordable undercut. For example, back in 2016, Allison teamed up with Republican Hair mastermind (and sometimes NATIVE contributor) Luke Dick for the first annual Haircuts for Humans, a fundraiser that offers free haircuts for the homeless and accepts donations for the Martha O’Bryan Center. Then, following the move/expansion of Hot

Yoga East, Allison started offering Free Yoga Wednesdays, which is exactly what it sounds like: every Wednesday from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. the studio offers sixteen classes that are all free to the public (we’re really running out of excuses for not going now). Given that the pay-what-you-can donations for Free Yoga Wednesdays and Haircuts for the Homeless both benefit the Martha O’Bryan Center, we probably should have guessed which nonprofit Allison would choose for this section. Says Allison about the Martha O’Bryan Center, which was founded in 1890 to combat poverty in North Nashville and has operated out of East Nashville’s Cayce Place since 1948: “One hundred percent of the [Free Yoga Wednesdays] donations go right back to the neighborhood by supporting the Martha O’Bryan Center and their mission to end the cycle of poverty in Nashville by empowering children, youth, and adults in poverty to transform their lives through education, employment, and fellowship. Free Yoga Wednesdays is one way I felt I could give back to the community— offering the healing benefits of yoga to folks by removing the financial obstacle.” If you’d like to donate to or volunteer at the Martha O’Bryan center, visit marthaobryan.org. If you’d like to check out Hot Yoga East or Scout’s, visit hotyogaofeastnashville.com or scoutsbarbershop.com.

Photographer: @dredrea

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