Music City express Nashville’s spell has claimed the hearts of these four Manitobans By: Eva Wasney Posted: 6:03 PM CST Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024

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This article was published 19/12/2024 (572 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Musicians are everywhere in Nashville: You can spot them arriving at the airport, carrying a guitar and an aura of hopeful excitement; or in parking lots and back alleys, lugging gear to and fro the city’s many stages.

Strike up a conversation with any bartender or rideshare driver and you’ll likely uncover a moonlighting singer or songwriter.

Artists travel to Nashville from far and wide seeking community, inspiration and opportunity — Manitobans included. During a recent visit, the Free Press connected with four Prairie locals whose genre-spanning careers have converged on the Music City in various ways.

The newcomer

Ben Stopfel arrives at Never Never — a sparse dive bar with dim, flickering lights — wearing a Kilter Brewing hoodie and a quiet smile. The low-key venue located in Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston neighbourhood next to a train track has become a favourite watering hole since moving to the city from Winnipeg last September with partner and fellow musician Taylor Janzen.

The couple headed south to escape the cold and the challenges of Canadian touring. Unlike Winnipeg, where the nearest hub is a day’s drive away, Nashville is highly connected by air and interstate — 75 per cent of the U.S. market is accessible via two-hour flight and 12 million people live within three hours of the city.

Upon arrival, however, they were met with ill-fitting jobs and a string of bad luck.

“Two weeks in, our car gets stolen,” says Stopfel, a guitarist and singer-songwriter.

They questioned their choices, but stuck it out. Thankfully so. In the last year, Nashville has started to feel like home. Stopfel and Janzen have dabbled in local songwriting circles, gotten to know the city’s best vintage shops and made many new friends, musical and otherwise.

“Everyone remembers how it felt to be new here, so instantly you’re folded in,” he says.

Stopfel has also penned more songs, picked up touring gigs as a session musician and landed a primo job manufacturing guitars at the Gibson factory.

“It’s almost too cute: I moved to Nashville and I work at the guitar store,” he says with a laugh. “It’s the coolest job I could’ve asked for.”

The permanent resident

In Nashville, touring, songwriting and recording need no explanation. A musician’s lifestyle is understood.

“I didn’t feel like an alien,” Brandy Zdan says over Zoom. “That was something that really drew me here.”

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Zdan felt like she needed to leave home to reach her full artistic potential. A multi-instrumentalist and founding member of the local Juno-nominated band Twilight Hotel, she hit the road in her early 20s and spent years playing guitar for American touring acts.

Zdan settled in Nashville a decade ago, where she and her husband (a drummer) own a home and are raising a four-year old daughter. It’s a comfy middle-class existence achieved while working full time in the music industry — something that didn’t feel possible early in her career.

“We just were not getting industry opportunities in Canada, but we were seeing them in the States,” she says.

Since moving south, Zdan has been able to focus on making her own music while pursuing a lifelong dream of producing records for other artists.

Ultimately, it’s the musical fellowship that keeps her in Nashville.

“Politically, it’s a nightmare. And I’m raising a daughter in Tennessee, which is crazy,” says Zdan.

The state is one of many to have criminalized abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022.

“I don’t think I’d stay here if it wasn’t for the record-making community.”

The long-distance collaborator

Brandi Vezina all but manifested her cross-border music career.

“I always knew in my heart that there would be a Nashville connection,” the Red River Métis country artist says over the phone from her home in Winnipeg.

“Ten years ago, I went down there with my best friend when I first sobered up and I got a tattoo on my foot that said, ‘Believe in your dreams.’”

Vezina has only visited the city a handful of times since then, but she’s developed close relationships with local studios, producers and musicians from afar. For the last two years, she’s been meeting with Styles Haury — a Nashville-based musician who has penned hits for the likes of Luke Bryan — for monthly songwriting sessions over FaceTime.

“It’s been a game-changer. I’ve been able to keep my authenticity with more of a commercial edge,” she says.

Staying true to her roots while co-writing with an American country artist occasionally results in some minor culture clashes. Popular country subjects such as boozing and hunting, for example, are no-gos for Vezina, a sober vegetarian.

“He’ll be like, ‘Brandi, don’t you want a hit?’” she jokes, mimicking her collaborator’s southern twang.

While Vezina cherishes her Manitoba collaborators, dipping into Nashville’s music scene has upped her game.

“I’ve put myself in rooms where the writers are better than me. I’ve had to get up in the big leagues and do my best — and I’ve been able to,” she says.

Still, she has no intention of leaving Manitoba — where she keeps horses, cats and dreams of owning a big house in the country.

“It’d be damn-near impossible uprooting them all.”

The convert

After a marathon multi-day road trip from Winnipeg to Nashville, Madeleine Roger’s first order of business is finding a honky-tonk bar in which to two-step the night away.

For a long time, Roger was skeptical of the city’s intimidating lore and massive commercial music machine. It seemed like “a place where the industry might swallow an artist alive,” she says.

Roger’s opinion made an about-face when a friend finally convinced her to visit. She’s been to Nashville five times in the last two years and is currently staying in the city for a month on a self-imposed writing retreat in the midst of a whirlwind touring season.

“Part of my hesitation to go was a fear of being anonymous and getting lost in this sea of other artists, but it’s been the opposite,” she says.

In a city where “everybody and their dog is trying to make new music,” Roger has found instant camaraderie and ample inspiration. Being adrift in an ocean of other songwriters feels surprisingly peaceful. People aren’t protective of their ideas and days spent scribbling lyrics and wrestling with melodies is nothing special — a dynamic that has proved creatively freeing.

“Having a lifelong practice of writing, I love thinking of it as something benign and spiritual at the same time. Like it can be everything and it can be nothing — and that feels possible here,” Roger says.

In some ways, Nashville itself even reminds her of home.

“It’s really spread out, and the urban planning is quite terrible,” she says with a laugh. “But there’s this absolutely incredible music community, and an incomprehensible amount of shows happening every night.”

City of songs

On a Wednesday night in downtown Nashville, four young, denim-clad musicians stroll onto the stage. Each is toting an acoustic guitar and prepared with a setlist of original songs — songs they wrote about their own dogs, their own trucks, their own relationships; songs they one day hope to hear on the radio, sung by a country superstar.

At one point, the performers may have had designs on being a frontman themselves, but writing songs for other artists is a very real, very viable career in Nashville. And Canadian songwriters have been making waves in the city for decades.

“As a nation, we are well-regarded down there within the community,” says Liam Russell, SOCAN’s creative executive for Nashville and Los Angeles. “People know that Canadians are great writers, but we also come with this interesting history of being hard workers.”

That work ethic, by Russell’s estimation, is a response to the immigratory and financial hurdles faced by Canadians working in the States. American ambition can also be contagious — especially in songwriting spheres, where writer’s rounds and co-writing sessions are an ingrained part of the culture.

“You learn so much by working with other people,” says Russell, who spent years working in Nashville as a musician. “(And in America) everyone wants to be the best in the world … and I think that contributes to the fact that people work harder to be better.”

While career songwriters exist in Canada, the niche has flourished in Nashville by virtue of its population density and established recording industry — more than 2 million people live in city’s metropolitan area and nearly every major label has a studio on Music Row.

In Nashville, Russell acts as a facilitator, helping the roughly 200 SOCAN members who live in the city make industry connections, solve rights issues and collect royalties.

For enterprising Canadian songwriters looking to break into the scene, he suggests applying for a stay in SOCAN’s Nashville House — low-cost accommodations available to visiting members once per year for a week at a time. The Nashville Songwriters Association, which offers international, month-to-month memberships, is another good resource for making local connections.

“Or, if you know anybody who has made the trip, just pick their brain,” Russell says. For Winnipeggers, that should be an easy task.

“Winnipeg is maybe the most creative hub in Canada right now,” he adds. “And there are a lot of songwriters who are going to Nashville from Winnipeg.”

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com