MAY 2017 R.LUM.R
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NASHVILLE JUST GOT LOUDER
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OF COOL SPRINGS Locally owned and family operated
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TABLE OF CONTENTS MAY 2017
58
68
28
38 THE GOODS 48
19 Beer from Here 20 Cocktail of the Month 24 Master Platers 77 You Oughta Know 81 Animal of the Month
FEATURES 28 Literature Spotlight: Ciona Rouse 38 Becca Mancari 48 Switters Iced Coffee 58 R.LUM.R 68 Rosemary & Beauty Queen
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RESPECT THE UNEXPECTED. VISIT PLOWBOYRECORDS.COM FOR NEW RELEASES
OUR ARTISTS: BLACKFOOT GYPSIES • BOBBY BARE • PAUL BURCH • BUZZ CASON • CHEETAH CHROME • CHUCK MEAD • THE FAUNTLEROYS • THE GHOST WOLVES • JD WILKES & THE DIRTDAUBERS • JIM ED BROWN • THE KENTUCKY HEADHUNTERS # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E
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president, founder:
publisher, founder:
ANGELIQUE PITTMAN JON PITTMAN
creative director:
MACKENZIE MOORE
managing editor:
CHARLIE HICKERSON DARCIE CLEMEN
art director:
COURTNEY SPENCER
community relations manager:
JOE CLEMONS
copy editor:
community representatives:
production:
POLLY RADFORD KELSEY FERGUSON
GUSTI ESCALANTE
writers: photographers:
CHRIS PARTON BENJAMIN HURSTON CHARLIE HICKERSON NATHAN DILLER COOPER BREEDEN ANGELINA MELODY DANIELLE ATKINS AUSTIN LORD ANDREA BEHRENDS CHRIS DANIELS JONATHON KINGSBURY EMILY DORIO
music + events intern:
LAUREL SORENSON
founding team: founder, brand director:
MACKENZIE MOORE JOSHUA SIRCHIO TAYLOR RABOIN DAVE PITTMAN
founder:
CAYLA MACKEY
for all inquiries:
HELLO@NATIVE.IS
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Live&INTERACTIVE ScreenPrinting Bring Us To Your Next Event! 16 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / //////
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516 HOUSTON ST. // NASHVILLE, TN 37203 // 615.988.2973 // BLOCKHOUSENASHVILLE.COM # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E
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Basil l n i s R l a i y e m s a a a n B m B e n a y m e il R RyBas Ryeman # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E
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LILAC COLLINS by Ben Clemons of No. 308 photo by Ange l in a Me l ody
My mother was my favorite person. She enjoyed a good Tom Collins during the summer months, Manhattans in the winter. Growing up, we had lilac trees in our driveway that bloomed outside my window every year right around Mother’s Day. Lilac blooms only last a few days, their flowers and smell fading away after the first rain. Mom was always great about snipping a bunch and placing them around the house. The smell is now permanently etched in my mind, fused with memories of her. This drink is for you, Mom. I love you. Happy Mother’s Day.
THE GOODS 2 oz vodka or London Dry Gin 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice 3/4 oz lilac syrup* F Shake all ingredients and pour into a freshly iced Collins or highball glass. Top with seltzer or club soda. Garnish with a lemon wheel.
*LILAC SYRUP
Boil 1/2 cup fresh lilac (or your favorite flower), 1 cup sugar, and 1 cup water until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and allow to steep for 30 minutes. Strain and cool before use.
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LUNCH SPECIALS
Have your event catered with Nashville's best Puerto Rican food. Call the number below for details!
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Welcomes Chef Andy Little BEGINNING MAY 2017
700 12TH AVE SOUTH - PRIMANASHVILLE.COM - 615.873.4232 # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E
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MASTER PLATERS
TO ISHAN
SIU MAI BY CHRIS CHEUNG OF TÁNSUO
PHO TOS BY DAN IELLE AT KIN S
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THE GOODS
DIRECTIONS
INGREDIENTS* FOR THE SIU MAI:
METHOD FOR THE SIU MAI:
5 lbs ground pork
FIn a large mixing bowl, combine the pork, fish, Sriracha, jicama, minced ginger, cornstarch, oyster sauce, and soy sauce. Mix with your hands or a spatula until all the ingredients are incorporated.
1/3 cup salted croaker fish, deboned without skin and minced in a dry state (you can find this at your local international market) 2 tbsp Sriracha 2 cups jicama, finely diced 3 tbsp minced ginger 2 tbsp cornstarch 3/4 cup oyster sauce 3/4 cup thin soy sauce 2 whipped egg whites with soft peaks wonton wrappers INGREDIENTS FOR TABLE SAUCE: 1 cup thin soy 1 tbsp sesame oil 1 piece of ginger 1 piece of cilantro root 1 tbsp sugar 1 cup white vinegar
FFold in the two whipped egg whites. Pinch off about a tablespoon of the filling and roll into a ball. Place the filling in the center of a wonton wrapper and press the wrapper up around the sides of the filling. Pat the top and bottom of the dumpling to make it flat. FPlace four pieces on an oiled paper surface in a steam basket. Steam for 6 to 7 minutes. Serve with table sauce. METHOD FOR THE TABLE SAUCE: F Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Cover and refrigerate. Allow the sauce to muddle for one day. Strain and serve with Toishan Siu Mai.
1 piece of star anise 1 piece of dried chile *This recipe makes a restaurant-sized batch of dumplings. For about 12 dumplings, cut the recipe to 1/2 lb pork and all other ingredients by a tenth.
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L I T E R AT U R E
S P O T L I G H T: P H O T O S
CIONA
B Y
RO USE
A U S T I N
L O R D
CIONA ROUSE IS A POET LIVING IN NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE. HER POETRY IS FEATURED ON WPLN NASHVILLE PUBLIC RADIO, NASHVILLE PUBLIC TELEVISION, AND MATTER. ROUSE’S FIRST POETRY CHAPBOOK WILL BE RELEASED MID-2017 BY THIRD MAN BOOKS. SHE BELIEVES IN THE POWER OF POETRY OUT LOUD IN PUBLIC SPACES, AND SHE CURATES MANY LITERARY EXPERIENCES IN THE CITY, INCLUDING THE MONTHLY LYRICAL BREW READING SERIES AT BARNES & NOBLE AND WRITINGS ON THE WALL, AN INTERACTIVE POETRY READING AT ATMALOGY. 28 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / //////
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but no air for Année Juredline Rouse Tinsley: Dec. 4, 2013 You began at 4:58 pm when I learned tears cry schizophrenia. I sighed a smile and sorrow, begged to exchange all previously answered prayers. I cursed my own breath when I learned you were heartbeat but no air. Why? Can’t my experienced lungs breathe for you? Tears cry schizophrenia. I let them go mad. For two hours, you were. Heartbeat strong, and I still swear you muscled a smile but no air flowing through your body, small as a palm. This. Was hello. And I love you. And goodbye. The heavens stand strong, and I still swear at them, even though God doesn’t quiver in the cosmos at should: how you should grab my pinkie feel fragile in my arms how we should skype the day your mom teaches you to say auntie how she should drop you off for a week of homemade pie and cupcakes how I should expose you to poetry and French films and let four-letter words sneak into your lexicon how you should ask me about birds, bees, honey and all things too sticky for her how we should take photographs together on your graduation days how I should look at them and remember how You muscled a smile when I whispered your name. Did you know the voice of your biggest fan? Ears, but no air. You ended by 7pm when I learned some requests for miracles get no responses no matter how prostrate you find yourself on the floor.
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spit the mouth entry point of garbage and good, the original scissor, the courier of voice lips make and receive kisses, gums bleed at tiny string touches the radio proclaims the mouth has healing properties. the saliva it produces breaks down, yes, but also builds up, toughens skin. how maybe a mama’s kiss on a wound really does make it all better. i wonder if they knew— when they clenched their cheeks summoned enough liquid in their mouths to fire at young black boys, black girls ordering a cold drink —did they know the whole truth about spit?
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Do The Crazy Thing Do the crazy thing The hard to imagine but somehow you did thing The brings you to your knees thing The no one would ever do it that way thing The safety net would not even matter thing The it could kill you but not trying is another kind of death thing The thing on your heart, do it and let them gasp right before they call it a thing of wonder
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burn oh shit i yell, & you turn the fan on as i bounce around the kitchen shaking my finger making shit shit shit my refrain. alleluia. you grab a stick of cold butter because that’s what your mama’s mama told her & she told you. i ask for ice because my mama says butter makes the skin sizzle, & i don’t know if grandma told her that or if she learned from experience but now we giggle-argue, you by the refrigerator door shaking butter at my face, me by the sink baptizing my forefinger with cold cold water. alleluia. & the oven still smokes from whatever it is i burned. this time. & i remember: hey wait a minute! you turned the fan on before checking on me! & you laugh. so hearty, juicy. i want to call you asshole but instead say, my god you’re so hot. allelu.
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AN UPSCALE dive bar
HAPPYHOUREVERYDAY3-7PM $6Wine+$3domestics+$4well
@centennial_nash @centennial5115
www.centennialnashville.com
blackbodies [Vantablack] when they finally found the deepest black, everyone looked in wonder at its power to hold everything— all the earth’s light—in its bosom. it never had to work twice as hard to prove it mattered.
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COFFEE BREAKFAST LUNCH OPEN DAILY 7AM-4PM
700 FATHERLAND ST. 615.770.7097 SKYBLUECOFFEE.COM E S TA B L I S H E D 2 0 1 0 36 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / //////
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WITH HER DEBUT ALBUM, GOOD
WOMAN, BECCA MANCARI OPENS THE D I A R Y O F A W E L L -T R A V E L E D M I S F I T
BY CHRIS PARTON PHOTOS BY ANDREA BEHRENDS
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LIKE A LOT OF YOUNG NASHVILLE ARTISTS, Becca Mancari is a transplant. But unlike many of her peers, Music City was never an end goal—it was more of a hurdle to clear. “I think I always knew I was gonna end up here since I was young, but I really didn’t want to,” she says, cracking a beer in her ramshackle Eastside bungalow. “I thought it was really cheesy . . . I just knew this was the place that would be the hardest for me as an artist, in that some of the best songwriters are from Nashville, and I wanted to challenge myself. You have to work your ass off here.” Born in Staten Island to a Puerto Rican mother and a Catholic Italian-Irish father, Mancari doesn’t fit neatly into any of Nashville’s boxes—and neither does her music. She’s not a country artist, although her songs are built on personal stories and down-home sounds. And she doesn’t think of herself as an Americana artist, either, even though American roots music is a primary influence. “There’s something about wearing a hat all the time,” she jokes about her country look, adjusting the vintage felt cap that tops cropped silky black hair and dark, compassionate eyes. “Hats are so symbolic now, but I just always wore one, even as a kid.” Mancari is gay, and she’s lived everywhere from West Palm Beach, Florida, to India. And with her debut album, Good Woman, she offers a gorgeous study in self-reflection, ultimately asking the question, “What is ‘good’ anyway?” Arriving in September, Good Woman twists and turns with
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the wind. At times it shimmers like an ocean sunrise, then dives to the bottom of the sea under crushing pressure. Resurfacing dazed but defiant, it paddles hard for a distant utopian shore, but in the end is left adrift at the mercy of her heart—and the human ego. Chatting cheerfully at her kitchen table, Mancari puts on the self-deprecating air of “just another songwriter,” but there’s more going on inside her head than just music. She’s gifted with a flair for soul-searching and razor-sharp emotional observation, all brought out by a fascinating background of not fitting in. After growing up Catholic in Pennsylvania and moving to Virginia for college, Mancari discovered roots music after falling in with a group of train hoppers who used her rail spur town as a jumping-off point. She came out of the closet around this time and found support with a group of misfits—those who were not welcome in polite society but made a place for themselves nevertheless. Inspired by the freedom of their lifestyle, she picked up and moved with a girlfriend to Arizona, got her heart broken, and boarded a bus for New Mexico. From there she headed to India on a whim, then continued on to South Florida to work as a janitor and eventually a high school teacher. Feeling lonely and cut off from her parents—who struggled to reconcile her identity with a lifetime of traditional faith—the songs began pouring out. After a few months of trying to inspire her students, she had an epiphany. “I’ve always had music in me, and I was telling these high school kids, ‘You can do anything and you should follow your dreams,’” she says. “I remember when I finally took it to heart myself and was like, ‘I should go to Nashville.’ They thought I was going to be on American Idol.” If you listen closely enough, the story plays out on Good Woman—from “Long Way Down” (all about missing Virginia and that first girlfriend) to the deserted heartbreak of “Arizona Fire.” Meanwhile, “Golden,” which is about a roommate’s divorce, was written feet
from where she now sits. Others, like “Dirty Dishes,” reveal an ongoing sense of self-doubt. “There’s a lot of state names in there, and I think that’s from traveling,” says Mancari. “Heartbreak is one of the elements, but it’s also a lot of spiritual stuff too—my own fight with believing something but not in the way I was taught it, [and] being gay. How do you reconcile that with a faith that often says you can’t be both?” Good Woman was produced by Kacey Musgraves’ guitarist Kyle Ryan, and the sound is as unique as Mancari herself: delicatebut-determined vocals are fused to spacey steel, jangling electric guitar, and a rock-solid rhythm section. “I think it’s like if country music got an injection of Radiohead,” she says with a chuckle. “Our hope is that we’re doing something that respects the roots but also has space and the future and the galaxy in it.” Although she doesn’t go around introducing herself as a gay woman, Mancari recognizes it’s an important part of her artistry. As an “untrained” musician, she says she can only sing what she knows. “It does infiltrate my songs,” she admits. “I mean, I write songs like ‘Summertime Mama’ that [are] so fun and literally just about having a crush on somebody and wanting them to notice me. But then I write a song called ‘Devil’s Mouth’ about my family, and it’s about this idea of being really upset with them. The words are harsh—‘Mama ain’t got no time / Daddy ain’t got no pride / You’ve been a long time running / You’ve been a long time gone’—but that’s how I feel.” Not afraid to use pronouns in her love songs, “Summertime Mama” is clearly about falling for a girl—and it’s touched a nerve in Nashville. The song has been in rotation on Lightning 100 for more than a year. “I think this town is craving that,” says Mancari. “I think they want it, and it’s becoming something they know that they actually need. They’re waking up and saying, ‘There’s a whole big world out there, and everybody’s coming from different places. We need to hear their stories.’”
“THERE’S A WHOLE BIG WORLD OUT THERE, AND EVERYBODY’S COMING FROM DIFFERENT PLACES. WE NEED TO HEAR THEIR STORIES.”
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Good Woman’s title track goes beyond identity issues and asks a question that’s at the heart of Mancari’s personal journey: “What does it mean to be a good person?” Based on a true story, “Good Woman” tells a first-person account of meeting a homeless woman (who happens to share Mancari’s mother’s name) and her young daughter. She takes the woman to a hotel and pays for a night’s stay, all the time wondering why she hopes someone else will witness her kindness. Is she just pretending to be good? And what does “good” really mean? Depending on your viewpoint, she’s either a saintly soul or a misguided enabler. It’s a deceptively powerful message for a time of social media echo chambers and us vs. them politics. “We live in a Trump era, and sometimes I just want to say, ‘They are bad people,’” she says with a sigh. “But I don’t even know where they come from. I went to a Trump rally the other day like, ‘I never talk to people like this,’ and I spent most of my time there trying to understand. If we don’t do that and start talking to each other, we’re in big trouble.” She hopes to do some talking this summer while on tour with good friends Hurray for the Riff Raff and SUSTO, and maybe even move a few unsuspecting hearts in the process. Whether she believes it or not, it seems that deep down Mancari has known what “good” is all along—and she’s no longer traveling that road alone. “Hopefully my life isn’t just about being cool,” she says. “I’ve seen it and I know it’s not for me, and maybe that goes back to the way I was raised. My parents are equally some of the hardest people and some of the best people I’ve ever known, because they taught me to love others—that it was more important than being famous.” Becca Mancari will perform with Hurray for the Riff Raff and SUSTO on May 3 at Mercy Lounge.
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New
Riverside Village - 1400 McGavock Pike - dosenashville.com # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E
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REVOLUTIONIZING THE MALE SHOPPING EXPERIENCE
OPENING THIS MONTH IN THE GULCH WWW.RUCKLEANDRYE.COM
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HAD SHERI AND KYLE Y O U N G S TA R T E D T H E I R EXCURSION THROUGH SOUTHEAST ASIA IN CAMBODIA INSTEAD OF THAILAND, WE ALL MIGHT BE MISSING OUT ON SWITTERS ICED COFFEE
B Y
B E N J A M I N
H U R S T O N
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P H O T O S
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C H R I S
D A N I E L S
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BACK IN 2011, the Youngs had been dating for about six months when they decided to take an extended trip to the other side of the world. About a month after flying into Bangkok, the couple had arrived for a weeklong stay in a private hut off the coast of Sihanoukville, Cambodia. They were just getting under the mosquito net to go to bed when they heard a sound that might have derailed it all. “It was loud, louder than anything,” Sheri remembers. “And I’d never heard any sound like it before.” The couple immediately got out a flashlight and searched for the source of the alarming noise, but they couldn’t find it. Uneasily, they eventually started to drift back to sleep when it rang out again, a pattern that would keep them up for most of the night. “It’s like somebody yelling through a fog horn,” she says, laughing now that she’s years removed from the situation. “Imagine hearing that and not knowing what or where it is, but just knowing that it’s super close while you try to sleep.” It turns out that a giant gecko—yes, that’s a real thing—had deemed their headboard the best place to call out for a mate in the night. This is, mind you, the same animal that US soldiers in the Vietnam War nicknamed the “fuckyou lizard.” It was an unsettling moment that Sheri says could have ruined the rest of their trip had they not already been sufficiently broken in. Thankfully, by that point, they had been through Northern Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam and had fallen in love with both the area and its traditional sweet iced coffee. A footlong lizard wasn’t going to scare them away. Six years after the gecko scare, Sheri welcomes me into the production headquarters of Switters Iced Coffee, the bare-bones microbrewery she and Kyle founded to bring the delicious coffee they experienced in Asia back to Nashville. It’s barely 7 a.m. when she opens the door, but like one might expect of a woman who makes coffee for a living, she’s delightfully peppy. “We’re starting to outgrow it a bit,” she says of the location, her high, clear voice carrying
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throughout the sizable space. Sheri is originally from Brandon, Mississippi, but her eight years in New York City after college have all but erased any trace of a Southern accent. Her Southern charm, however, is still very much intact. As she gives me the tour, she points to different devices and walks me through their brewing process—well, most of their brewing process. Against one wall, a black sheet or tarp hides some sort of contraption from view. It’s part of their cooling technique, but I’m not allowed to see it. “We’re the only ones doing this,” she says of their brewing method. “So since we are some of the little guys, we like to keep a little bit of mystery.” It’s hard to blame them. From the longtime heavyweights like Bongo to the new shops that seem to have opened on every corner over the last decade, their small coffee business is smack-dab in the middle of one of the best coffee cities in the country (Travel + Leisure ranked us #13). Finding success in an already saturated environment with just three people on full-time payroll might seem like a daunting task, but over the last few years, they’ve steadily built a name for themselves by doing things just a little differently. For starters, Switters coffee only comes cold. Partial to the iced drink for its refreshing taste and ability to be enjoyed for longer amounts of time (i.e. you don’t have to rush to finish it while it’s hot), Sheri swears she can’t remember the last time she had a hot cup of coffee. The Youngs drink it iced year-round. “With iced coffee, you feel like you can take your time and enjoy it longer,” she says as she picks up her own cup of Switters Single Origin Coffee. “We put a lot of effort and time and energy into it, and we want people to have something they can sit and relax with and enjoy.” Another way Switters stands apart from some of the other coffee around town is that it’s brewed using the traditional Japanese method. Unlike cold brew, which is made by steeping coffee grounds in cool water for twelve hours or more, Switters flash-chills their coffee by brewing it hot and then immediately cooling it
“A LOT OF THE RECORD COMES FROM ME JUST ASKING MYSELF WHY .”
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“WE WANT PEOPLE TO HAVE SOMETHING THEY CAN SIT AND RELAX WITH AND ENJOY.”
over ice. According to Sheri and Kyle (and a lot of other Japanese-method brewers out there), heat is necessary to extract the most flavor from the beans, and the flashchill helps lock in those defining tastes. A quick Internet search reveals there’s scientific evidence to support their claim that involves words like volatility, solubility, and oxidation, but I’ll leave that up to the more chemistry-minded readers to explore on their own. “There is some great cold brew out there,” Sheri explains. “Cold brew tastes a little more flat, and to me, iced flash-chilled has more of a punch to it,” she says, snapping her fingers. Sheri met Kyle, who is a Nashville native, about seven years ago when they were both living and working in New York City. One of her friends wanted to set her up with a guy on her flag football team, but she wasn’t so sure, so they did what any logical millennials would do: they had a group hang. In a twist of fate, however, Sheri never met her intended date. Once with the group she started talking to Kyle, and six months later, the two were making a plan to quit their jobs and head out for Southeast Asia. “Because that’s how normal relationships work, right?” she jokes. It was on the trip that the two were first introduced to a version of the traditional Vietnamese iced coffee they now bottle and sell in restaurants and venues around town. Starting in Bangkok, they worked their way north, enjoying slightly different takes on the area’s sweet iced coffee at each stop along the way. But it wasn’t until a few weeks into the trip, when they were in Laos, that they first began getting the idea to bring it back with them. “We thought, We live in New York, and there’s coffee everywhere. Why is this better?” she
remembers. “When we got back, it was sort of this thing that just didn’t go away.” Originally just a hobby, the couple started experimenting with different recipes in their apartment. Using first a popcorn popper and then a more professional Behmor drum roaster, they began roasting their own beans and trying out pretty much all the different ways of making iced coffee: cold brew, the Japanese method, drip tower, AeroPress, Chemex, etc. Every weekend, they’d invite friends from their building to try what they’d made, eventually landing on a recipe that used the Japanese method and was lightly sweetened with condensed milk. About that same time, they were talking about the possibility of moving back south to be closer to family. With their recipe finalized, they decided to give it a go. The Youngs arrived in Nashville in August 2013, and by April of the next year they ran their first production round of Switters Iced Coffee. “People ask me a lot if I’m Mrs. Switter,” Sheri says when I ask how they got the name. It turns out, that was inspired by the Asian trip as well. While on the road, they met a bunch of fellow travelers, one of the most interesting and memorable of whom went by the nickname Switter. When it came time to select a title for their company, Kyle threw it out as a possibility. Finding it both catchy and laced with a little Southern charm, they decided to go for it. “Everything sort of circles back to that Southeast Asia trip,” Sheri says. She’s not kidding. Along with the business, which she refers to as their “first baby,” the couple also has a sixteen-month-old daughter named Mardi. She was named after a mountain in Nepal called Mardi Himal that her parents climbed toward the end of their trip. Sheri says most people’s first thought is Mardi Gras. “She was born on Tuesday, so it kind of fits too,” Sheri jokes.
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And it’s not just the Young family that’s been expanding. Along with their Sweet Coffee (the pair’s perfected take on the traditional brews they had in Asia), Switters has grown to include a spectrum of tasty java offerings. From the bottled Black Coffee and Honey Coffee to the Single Origin light roasts to even rarer summer specialties—like the polarizing Iced Coffee Lemonade—Sheri and Kyle haven’t stopped experimenting with new ways to give people better iced coffee. One of their most promising recent additions is their Nitro Coffee, a foamier, creamier take on their Black Coffee. The carbonated specialty brew is served on tap at an increasing number of restaurants and venues around town, including Musicians Corner, Nashville Farmers’ Market, and the Country Music Hall of Fame. According to Sheri, the growth they’ve seen in all of their drinks, specifically the Nitro Coffee, can be attributed in part to the local and national community’s growing knowledge of and appreciation for coffee. It’s a trend she hopes will continue as the culture becomes more educated about the food and drink they’re putting in their bodies. “People are realizing that coffee doesn’t have to be bad,” she says. “It’s a lot like grapes and wine. It’s super complex . . . and the more you know about it, the more you’re in awe.” If Nashville’s current coffee scene is any indication, consumers agree. With the city’s coffee shop per capita at an all-time high, Sheri admits that it can feel pretty competitive at times. But she and Kyle welcome a little healthy competition—it’s what keeps their small team driven to offer the best and most vibrant iced coffee they can brew. “From our end, we think if someone is making great iced coffee, that’s wonderful because the more that’s out there, the better for all of us,” she says. “At the end of the day, there’s plenty of room for everybody to drink good iced coffee, as long as we get it out there.”
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OPERA O N T H E M O U N TA I N
JOIN US FOR AN EVENING OF SONGS AND STARGAZING AT VANDERBILT DYER OBSERVATORY
SATURDAY, JUNE 3 6:00PM-10:00PM
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SEE CARL BROEMEL ON JUNE 3 AS MUSICIANS CORNER RETURNS FOR ITS EIGHTH YEAR OF PRESENTING FREE MUSIC EVENTS IN CENTENNIAL PARK. # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E VIEW THE ENTIRE 2017 SCHEDULE AT MUSICIANSCORNERNASHVILLE.COM
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BY CHARLIE HICKERSON | PHOTOS BY JONATHON KINGSBURY
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HOW R.LUM.R WENT FROM BEING AN ANGRY KID IN FLORIDA TO THE VOICE ON Y O U R FAV O R I T E P L AY L I S T OVER THE BIZARRO CROONING of Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO TOUR Llif3,” Reggie Williams—a generally affable R&B artist better known as R.LUM.R—sighs. It’s the day before Easter, and we’re holed up at the new Fort Houston space shooting the photos for this article. “This is a little depressing, isn’t it?” he asks, studio lights flashing and low-hanging fog circling his Adidas. Maybe he’s talking about the shoot. Or the interview. Or being someone who has to do shoots and interviews. Maybe the fog and lights are simply making everything a little moodier in here. “‘All my friends are dead / Push me to the edge?’” he says, quoting Uzi. “I mean, damn!” I skip to the next track on the playlist— “Mask Off ” by Future, even more depressing in a sort of Byronic way—before settling on Frank Ocean, who Williams regularly covers during his shows. It’s not much better in the depression department, but Williams is already singing along: “Glory from above / Regard me dear / It’s all downhill from here.” By this point, I’ve spent roughly four hours with R.LUM.R over the course of the past week, so I’m used to the singing. Frank Ocean, Fleet Foxes, Ray LaMontagne, Joni Mitchell, Staind (yes, the “It’s Been Awhile” band, more on that later)—it’s all fair game. Normally, someone sporadically bursting into song drives me—and I believe this is the technical term here—up the damn wall. But with Williams, it can be funny, endearing, and even calming, like the voice of a soft-
spoken relative or an old friend you haven’t seen in awhile. Perhaps this is because Williams can sing. You don’t use words like recognizable, unique, or distinct when describing his voice. You can (because it is all of those things), but those words are too often reserved for singers that sound like cartoon characters. R.LUM.R sings the same way Prince, Otis Redding, and Freddie Mercury did—with a supernatural ability that convinces you this is what he was put on earth to do. As George Jones, who’s in the club I just mentioned, would say: “You know this old world is full of singers / But just a few are chosen / To tear your heart out when they sing.” R.LUM.R sings like that. He can also write clever, catchy songs, play classical guitar, compose and program tracks on Ableton, and sight-read his ass off. But it’s that voice—the effortless falsetto, the restrained anger hiding behind crisp delivery, the triumphant bursts of energy during the choruses—that initially made me (and nine hundred thousand monthly Spotify listeners) pay attention. Much has been made of that Spotify account, where R.LUM.R’s lead single, “Frustrated,” has racked up more than thirteen million streams. In fact, while researching for this article, I couldn’t find a single piece of press that didn’t mention the streaming service. In these write-ups and videos, one narrative continually emerges: R.LUM.R has gained millions of streams on Spotify in # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E
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less than two years, so why doesn’t anyone know who he is? It’s a fair point (and clickable headline), but it’s also a little shortsighted. Yes, a lot of people have listened to him in a very short time. And yes, his Spotify numbers exceed other local artists who are bonafide national superstars (e.g. Jason Isbell). But Williams isn’t some Internet enigma enjoying dumb luck because of a Disclosurey single and coveted playlist placements. He’s a complicated, versatile artist who’s worked years to get here. EGE “You grow up thinking that the John Mayers and [artists] of the world are endowed with this gift, and they live on Mount Olympus and us plebeians are here to be given their ambrosia,” Williams says, affecting a faux regal accent that falls somewhere between Judi Dench and Cruella de Vil. “But you’re never told about all the work and training and sacrifice that goes on the back end to create that persona and create that ability.” Today’s work and training: readying a new lighting rig for a set at Mercy Lounge next week. We’re in a Donelson garage, but thanks to the series of LED-lined mirrors, it feels more like the Millennium Falcon mid-hyperdrive. Lighting designer Jonathon Kingsbury (who shot the photos for this piece) meticulously syncs the lights to R.LUM.R’s set, while Williams occasionally gives feedback and says things like, “Motherfuckers are going to lose their minds!” That may be true, but Williams also realizes that, much like the Spotify streams and his new video for “Frustrated,” the lights are only one part of the equation. “I’ll say what I need to say through my work,” he asserts, the lights reflecting off his glasses. “I know that’s the longer, more difficult path. But I’ve never been known to take the easiest path.” EGE Williams was born and raised in Bradenton, Florida, a coastal town outside of Sarasota that’s home to Champs Sports and Tropicana Orange Juice. His father was a Gulf War veteran with anger issues and a drinking problem, and his mom—in Williams’ words—“did her best . . . She’s just
an imperfect human who tried, but it didn’t really work well.” They divorced when Williams was five, and it marked the beginning of a rough childhood. “I’ve been in therapy and counseling literally as long as I can remember, my entire life,” the twenty-seven-year-old says. “Like, since age five or six, because that’s when all these outbursts and freakouts started happening—probably about me feeling alienated because my father wasn’t there.” Though Williams doesn’t remember the outbursts, he’s heard the stories. There was the time he threw a desk at a teacher, and another when he dislodged a fellow student’s retina after throwing a pencil at his eye. The freakouts subsided as he got older, but the difficulties didn’t. His childhood was marred by custody battles, threats of being sent to live with his father (who had a new family by that point—“He chose them over us,” Williams later says), and more violence. He tells me one particularly harrowing story in which he was called out of elementary school because of an emergency at his paternal grandmother’s house. Once he arrived at the house, he realized that his father, who was drunk at the time, had punched Williams’ grandmother in the face. “[I remember] being there stunned,” he says, “with my grandma crying with this big welt on her face.” Like countless others before him, Williams made sense of his surroundings through music. He’d always loved stuff like Sade, Sarah Vaughan, Anita Baker, and Bill Evans growing up, but he didn’t realize there was anything else until he was a teenager. His introduction to rock and hip-hop was . . . unorthodox. “The first musical group I can remember hearing that wasn’t soul, blues, R&B, or jazz—which is all we were allowed to listen to growing up, because my mother didn’t like anything else—was Linkin Park,” he explains, laughing. “Hearing Linkin Park that first time for me was like, Yo, there’s different types of music out there.” The anger, alienation, and angst of Chester Bennington and co. understandably struck a nerve with the troubled middle schooler, who, in addition to his problems at home, was struggling to find his identity.
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“There’s that Earl Sweatshirt lyric: ‘Too white for the black kids, too black for the whites.’ I was that kid,” he remembers. “I was the kid in middle school that listened to Linkin Park and wanted to play Yu-Gi-Oh . . . I wanted to wear the tight jeans and shop at Hot Topic, but my hair wouldn’t swoosh, so I couldn’t be that, ya know?” Linkin Park would serve as the gateway into other hard rock like Circa Survive, Coheed and Cambria, The Mars Volta, and yes, even Staind. “People laugh about [it] . . . But that record, Break the Cycle, was so emo but so important to me . . . I just remember laying in my bed as a fourteenyear-old, tears in my eyes, just like, ‘This guy fucking gets me, man!’” Unlike his friends in the Sarasota hardcore scene—one of which was Chris Martignago, his current manager— Williams couldn’t afford an electric guitar or drums. So at fourteen, he bought a $250 Yamaha CG101 acoustic with some money he’d earned at a “hella illegal” busboy job. The acoustic led to a deep appreciation of singer-songwriters like John Mayer, and it wasn’t long before Williams was “writing songs about girls that didn’t like me.” Roughly a year later, that Yamaha was one of the few things—along with a backpack full of clothes and some school supplies—that Williams took with him when he moved out of his mom’s house following an argument about stolen money. Or maybe it was a cell phone. Or the volume of his guitar. There were so many fights, he says, that it’s hard to pinpoint what this one was even about. Williams would spend the rest of high school living with friend and Manatee School of the Arts classmate Mikey Mejia. His relationship with buddies like Mejia and Martignago inspired the idea of framily: a portmanteau, mind-set, and hashtag that R.LUM.R frequently mentions on social media. “Your friends become the new family for you—because that’s literally how it happened for me. Mikey was like my brother, his mother was like my mother,” he says. “Your friends are the family you choose. That’s where that framily thing comes from, and that’s why it’s so important to me. That’s why I want to extend it to [my] audience.” After studying classical guitar and music theory at Manatee, Williams enrolled at Florida State with a classical guitar scholarship and plans to go into musical therapy. Getting better at guitar and learning the ins and outs of Pro Tools was great, but like many music students, Williams eventually decided that the best way to play music for a living was—well, to play music for a living. He dropped out in 2013 and moved to Orlando, where he crashed on Martignago’s couch and played the local bar scene. The four-hour sets were radio-friendly affairs that wouldn’t be out of place on Broadway or Division, and they served as trial-by-fire lessons in performing. “If you can get the dude that is only concerned about the NCAA game on the LCD screen above your head to pay
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attention to you . . . then you’ve kind of got something,” he says, starting to chuckle. “And if you suck, that tip jar will be very empty, and you’ll be very hungry. And that’ll give you a lot of time to wonder Why? Why am I so poor? Why do people hate what I do?” He didn’t have to wonder for long. In 2015, Martignago relocated to Nashville to work in A&R at Atlantic, and Williams followed suit six months later. EGE “There were a lot of weird, chance, serendipitous happenings, where I just happened to be in the right place at the right time or somebody saw something in me,” Williams tells me when discussing the move. “And now I’m here.” Two of those somebodies were Martignago and Steve “Stevo” Robertson, Atlantic’s senior vice president of A&R. Williams, who at this point was a fledgling singersongwriter with a couple of folk-tinged EPs to his name, played them some tracks that he’d made with producer J. Cruz. The plan was to pitch some songs for Atlantic R&B and pop artists—but Martignago and Robertson had other ideas. “He was supposed to write for Jason Derulo,” Martignago remembers. “I had gotten a brief for that project, but instead of doing what the brief said, they did whatever they wanted—which is how Reggie likes to be generally.” Upon hearing the songs, which included early versions of R.LUM.R tracks like “Be Honest,” “Nothing New,” and “Show Me,” Martignago turned to Robertson and said, “Am I crazy? Or does this not sound like anything on the label right now?” Robertson agreed, and Williams was soon signed to Atlantic-affiliated indie label PRMD—as R.LUM.R, not Reggie Williams. Beyond the name change, it marked a huge change in direction for Williams, whose older material was more James Bay than James Blake. “People get a sense of you or see you as one thing,” he says. “So when you trade and do a different thing or do a side project or something like that, you really have to be careful. Because truth be told, I wasn’t sure that people would even take this seriously.” With that in mind, Williams approached recording “Frustrated” with a not-so-serious attitude. Written back in Orlando as a jazzy, vaguely George Benson-esque track, the song was one of three that Williams brought to his first session with local EDM artist Super Duper. He tracked the guitar and vocals in one take, told Super Duper what kind of synth waveforms he liked, and left. A few weeks later, he was sent a rough mix. That “rough mix” is now well on its way to fourteen million streams. “I never thought this kind of thing was possible for a kid like me, some black kid from Bradenton,” he says. “Life’s crazy, bro.”
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EGE It’s standing room only at Mercy Lounge, and Williams is alone on stage, flanked by Kingsbury’s light rig. His band has left to let him play a mini set with nothing but his Stratocaster. There aren’t any LCD big screens playing NCAA games, but even if there were, I have a feeling the crowd would still be zoned in on R.LUM.R. “A tornado flew around my room before you came,” he sings, launching into a slow-burning cover of Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin Bout You.” Almost on cue, the woos begin, the singalong starts, and the iPhones come out. The falsetto chorus—which Williams later tells me, “You either hit it or you don’t”—is hit, and then some. In an almost vulgar display of vocal power, he elongates the “ahead,” letting everyone in the room know that he, to quote George Jones again, can tear your heart out when he sings. The band comes back onstage to loud, but not quite raucous, applause. Williams briefly thanks the crowd before launching into “Frustrated,” at which point motherfuckers do, in fact, lose their minds. Looking out at Williams on stage— sweat dripping over his glasses and hair bouncing with the beat—I can’t help but think of that kid from Bradenton. The one that washed dishes to get a guitar and slept on couches and couldn’t get his hair to swoosh. I’m reminded of something he told me a few days before the show, back when the lights were still short-circuiting in the Donelson garage. “In the music industry, and especially in the creative arts, we’re essentially asking a bunch of people who are dealing with varying levels of depression, anxiety, body image issues, gender issues, and identity things to codify it and give it to us in a way that we can understand. That’s fucking crazy! But some people are so motivated to do it . . . I feel like I have to do it.”
New name, same great people and services!
We are thrilled to announce that we are merging with our sister skincare experts at Ona Belle Meade and changing our name to Ona Skincare East Nashville. We look forward to the year ahead and continuing to serve your skincare needs!
R.LUM.R is on tour now, and his debut EP will be out this summer.
East Nashville:
1013 Fatherland St.
Belle Meade:
6592 Highway 100 Suite 1
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SEAN ROWE w/ FAYE WEBSTER - THE HIGH WATT THE WIND + THE WAVE - THE HIGH WATT JET BLACK ALLEY CAT w/ GOLD ZOO & THE BAND CAMINO - THE HIGH WATT RÜFÜS DU SOL - CANNERY BALLROOM BIFFY CLYRO w/ SPIRIT ANIMAL - MERCY LOUNGE BIG BOI VS. ANDRÉ 3000 TRIBUTE - MERCY LOUNGE CHRIS PUREKA - THE HIGH WATT TOBIN SPROUT AND ELF POWER - THE HIGH WATT THE MOUNTAIN GOATS w/ MOTHERS - CANNERY BALLROOM TY SEGALL - MERCY LOUNGE SAY ANYTHING / BAYSIDE - CANNERY BALLROOM TIM KASHER OF CURSIVE & THE GOOD LIFE - THE HIGH WATT DIET CIG w/ SPORTS - THE HIGH WATT JAMESTOWN REVIVAL w/ COLTER WALL - CANNERY BALLROOM JAMES PWR BTTM w/ TANCRED & NNAMDI OGBONNAYA - MERCY LOUNGE POKEY LAFARGE w/ LILLIE MAE - MERCY LOUNGE DANIEL ROMANO - MERCY LOUNGE THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART - THE HIGH WATT # NAT I V ENAS HV I L L E
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HOW TWO FRIENDS PLANNED THE NICEST H O U S E PA R T Y I N E A S T N A S H V I L L E
B Y N A T H A N D I L L E R | P H O T O S B Y E M I LY D O R I O
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WHEN I KNOCK ON THE WOODEN FRONT DOOR of 1102 Forrest Avenue, I hear Jim O’Shea, cofounder of new bar and restaurant concept Rosemary & Beauty Queen, yell, “Come on in!” I make my way through the one-story house and find O’Shea and his partner, Andrew Mischke, on the back patio, taking a smoke break in the sun. Rosemary, the first of the two bars, is set to open in a couple of weeks, and it’s crunch time. The night before, Mischke, the former general manager of Mercy Lounge, returned to his old stomping grounds and hopped behind the bar for the first time in four and a half years “to kind of dust some rust off before we open here,” he says. “It’s like riding a bike though.” Mischke and O’Shea met more than ten years ago, when O’Shea was bartending and planning events. Mischke, thirty-seven, convinced his friend to come work with him at Mercy, and the two bonded over common music tastes, booking bands like Miami Horror and Yeasayer at a time when they weren’t regularly coming through Nashville. All the while, they stayed on the lookout for opportunities to open their own place. They liked the idea of channeling their years of experience into something of their own, where they’d have creative control. O’Shea found himself asking, “Why are we doing all this for everybody else when we can be doing it for ourselves?” Then, two years ago, Mischke’s real estate agent wife came to him with a suggestion: a 1200-square-foot yellow house she’d sold to some friends was available to lease, and she urged him to take a look. “It was like, ‘Listen, if something cool comes along we think we can work with, [we’ll take it]’ . . . This was probably the fifth place that came across our path, and we jumped on it,” says O’Shea, thirty-nine, sitting on a plush green ottoman in what used to be one of two bedrooms in the house. “It definitely helps to have a significant other in the real estate world to hear about locations and stuff like that, for sure,” adds Mischke. He called O’Shea, and they decided it was just what they’d been looking for. Rosemary will live in the main house, while Beauty
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Queen will take up residence in the attached garage, existing as kindred businesses connected by a courtyard. Both will offer food and drinks, with a few slight differences that O’Shea and Mischke are still working out, and customers can wander back and forth and pay wherever they end up. The space dictated the concept, and O’Shea liked the idea of a multidimensional experience. Years ago, after he told a friend to meet him at a local bar, she replied, “Aw, that place is like an aboveground pool.” “I was like, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ and she said, ‘Once you get there what do you do, you know? Once you’re in, okay, now what?’” he recalls. “I thought that was kind of a good analogy. We didn’t want to be an above-ground pool. We wanted to be a kind of triathlon of sorts . . . If you get bored with a certain aspect here, there’s always something else you could check out.” With the exception of some minor tweaks outside, the 113-yearold house looks much the same as it did before. But Mischke and O’Shea redesigned the interior, removing walls and adding builtin bookshelves. The bar features jade-green tile by Red Rocks Tileworks and is flanked by two colorful stained glass windows. Though this all might sound a little posh, they also made sure to maintain the integrity of the space—O’Shea found most of the furniture at flea markets and antique stores. “We really wanted to keep as much of the feeling of this being an old house as possible, and I think we did that,” he says. “We just really wanted to build around what was already here.” They took that same approach to the venture as a whole, as they sought to fill a void in the bar scene while catering to the neighborhood they love. “My first place out of my parents’ house was in East Nashville in like 1999, right after the tornado,”
Mischke says. “Both Jim and I have lived here the majority of our lives and seen the way that this neighborhood has developed . . . and it’s just exciting to be a part of that, particularly when it’s in a neighborhood that you lived in before you could legally drink.” They see Rosemary as the kind of place where a gregarious, well-dressed neighbor might host friends—a refined yet unpretentious space in which you can drink what you like and unwind. “If you want to come in and you want a vodka cranberry, yes, you can have a vodka cranberry—we’re not gonna look at you funny for it,” says O’Shea, who, like Mischke, is wearing a hoodie and jeans. “And if you really want to hurt yourself, we’ve got a Fireball shot for you.” For those customers who like the finer things, they’ll have a few specialty drinks, including their take on a piña colada—“Just the sweetest milkshake thing you can get,” says O’Shea. There’s also a Paloma that was dreamt up with the help of head bartender Alise Alicardi, or as O’Shea calls her, “Our head huckleberry.” Chuck Anderson, owner of the Death From a Bun food truck, will head up the kitchen. Anderson, who is an Air Force veteran, developed a taste for bao (steamed Chinese and Taiwanese dough buns) during his travels and opened his truck last year when he couldn’t find the buns in Nashville after moving from New York. Anderson incorporates local and international flavors and will serve up buns with fillings like pork belly and Philly cheesesteak. Although they’ll have table service later, for now, he’ll park his truck out back before moving into the main kitchen, which will operate out of Beauty Queen when it opens later in the year. When that’s up and running, he also plans to expand the menu. Mischke and O’Shea share their desire to create a tasteful neighborhood nightspot with other
“IF YOU WANT TO COME IN AND YOU WANT A VODKA CRANBERRY, YES, YOU CAN HAVE A VODKA CRANBERRY— WE’RE NOT GONNA LOOK AT YOU FUNNY FOR IT.”
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, C L E A NI V E S COHE UCT PROD OS PHOT
Nashvillians, and they’ve attracted a host of local investors like Mark Watrous, guitarist for The Shins, and Jaren Johnston, lead singer of The Cadillac Three. “It’s one of the coolest things about this,” says Mischke. “Having a lot of people that you know [who] believe in something and want to see it work for the same reasons you do, because they’re part of the culture in the city and have lived here for a long time . . . I think it’s great that people from all over the world are investing money in Nashville. It’s awesome. I have no problem with it at all, but I also think it’s really cool for us to be able to put something like this together with small money that is exclusively local.” When they aren’t spinning a “very specific and intentional” playlist curated to set the tone of the evening, they’ll have friends select and play records on the vintage speakers. “DJ in the very initial sense of the term,” Mischke stresses. “Not the postSkrillex version. But like, [all the] people that we’ve ever had reach out about wanting to come play music. Everyone from guys who’ve fronted soul bands to local music writers.” And while O’Shea admits that with greater freedom comes greater responsibility—“I’ve got a lot more grey hair, I’m stressing out and [having] panic attacks and shit,” he says, laughing—he’s happy he and Mischke opened their own place. “To be able to create something was fun,” he says. “Make something that was our own and is us and something we kind of take pride in. I mean, I’m proud of what we’re doing and I’m not saying I didn’t like the other places we worked in the past, but there’s always things I would’ve done differently and now I get a chance to do those things.” As we near the end of our conversation, we get up and the guys get back to preparations, running down their to-do lists and talking of plans to hang lights from the trees out back. Before long, they’ll have company, and Mischke and O’Shea hope they feel at home.
QUICKUND RO R U T NA
Rosemary is open now at 1102 Forrest Avenue.
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YOU OUGHTA KNOW: MORNING TELEPORTATION
MOR TELEPORNING TATION For more info on Morning Teleport ation, morningt visit eleporta tion.ban Follow dcamp.co @Morning m Teleport ation
In 2011, Morning Teleportation was a high-octane affair. Expanding Anyway, the Bowling Green natives’ debut that came out that year, was a collection of Shins-adjacent rock that combined elements of ’70s prog, garage rock, and bluegrass. It was a harder-edged sound that differentiated them from the synthy indie rock scene of the time, and it led to appearances at Bonnaroo and Electric Forest. Now, after some lineup changes and over a year of recording at Isaac Brock’s (Modest Mouse) Ice Cream Party Studios, Morning Teleportation is out with their long-awaited sophomore LP, Salivating for Symbiosis. The album is a more polished, meditative take on Expanding’s sound and offers everything from banjo-led singalongs to frantic horn arrangements. It also features contributions from members of past NATIVE cover story Cage the Elephant and Death Cab for Cutie. Catch Morning Teleportation on tour this summer and check out Salivating for Symbiosis now. NAT II VV ENAS ENAS HV HV II LL LL EE ## NAT
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ANIMAL OF THE MONTH
The
A century ago, a cougar sighting this far east of the Rockies would not have been too unexpected. Just like wolves and bears, cougars roamed the whole country prior to European settlement. But all that changed once colonists began to tame the land. As farming became more prevalent, cougars were classified as a dangerous predator and a bounty was put on their head. They were hun hunted until only the ones out west remained. Their populations dropped until the second half of the last century, when they were decriminalized and managed as a game species. Now those Western populations are expanding, and the cougars have begun to make their way back east. There are now a few populations in the midwestern United States, and some are even more ambitious in reclaiming their old stomping grounds, with confirmed sightings as far east as Middle Tennessee! Different people have different names for the same cougar: mountain lion, puma, panther, catamount. All refer to the same species, Puma concolor. The long list of names can most likely be attributed to its wide range, which happens to be one of the most extensive of all land-dwelling mammals. They can be found from the southern tip of South America up to Canada. To add to the list, we also have one cougar subspecies in the United States, the Florida panther, which has a limited range in Florida and small population of less than two hundred cats. Given its size and its status as one of the few wild cats we have in North America, it’s difficult to mistake a cougar with anything else. The bobcat, one of our only other wild cats, is only about half its size. If you see a cat that looks bigger than a housecat, check out its tail—cougars have long tails while a bobcat has a shorter, stubbier
Written by Cooper Breeden*
one. The cougar is the largest feline predator we have in the states and is roughly the same size as a gray wolf. To put that in perspective, both lions and tigers are at least twice as large, if not four or five times larger, than a cougar. If cougars reached the size of their feline cousins overseas, a walk in the woods following confirmed sightings would be a bit more harrowing. The cougar, like a true American, makes its home from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans and anywhere in between. Wherever it decides to hang its hat, it leaves itself plenty of wiggle room with ranges up to 125 square miles. Cougars are solitary animals, spending most of their lives alone except when they’re breeding or the females are raising young. Generally, a male’s home range will overlap that of a female’s. When breeding season rolls around, the female heralds her readiness to mingle with a scream. When it’s all said and done, she’ll give birth to a litter of up to six kittens, which will hang around and learn to hunt until they’re about two years old, at which point they’ll go out on their own. Though cougars have been spotted in Tennessee, you can rest assured that there’s no cause for concern. A few sightings don’t necessarily mean we have actual populations of cougars—they are more than likely just a small handful of rogue individuals pushing east. If that’s the case, it’ll be a while before an official population is established. That, combined with their shy demeanor, makes a cougar encounter about as rare as a lightning strike. If, on the other hand, an encounter is what you seek, head on over to the Nashville Zoo’s Jungle Loop for a friendly meet-up. Or if you want something a little more wild, you should have no problem finding a large breeding population of cougars on Broadway most Saturday nights.
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N OW O P E N I N F R A N K L I N !
A SALON FOR MEN & WOMEN OF ALL AGES WA L K I N A N Y D AY O F T H E W E E K F O R A Q U A L I T Y C U T O R S T Y L E
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@wldrnessa Photo by: @dredrea
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