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The only other artist to get the crowd on their feet that day was fellow Texan George Strait, for whom the lack of due respect would be akin to blasphemy. She received a standing ovation, rows and rows of crinkled chinos and checkered shirts visible above the railings.
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There were no cookies opened, no sandwich bites taken, the fingerpicking on her guitar resounding in perfect echo, the way it can only when the people in the audience are frozen still and shocked into full attention, with- out an accidentally buzzing phone or whispered conversation. They peered at each other on occasion to keep the time, but mostly Kacey stared up to that top pew, looking both forward and into her past. Bandleader Misa Arriaga flanked her to one side and Emily Nelson, a cello player who came up through the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music, on the other. She started strumming, her voice hitting crisply against the Ryman’s wood interior as she stood solemnly in a black dress and white heels, a streak of blond hair bisecting her dark bangs. It would be, they imagined, something well within the parameters that Music Row had neatly established for success. Or maybe it would be a nostalgic nod to teenage love by the single stoplight, a diary entry set to simple chords, the way Taylor Swift had done it. “This song is inspired by growing up in a small town in the South,” Kacey said, setting up the audience for what they were sure would be some kind of classic country lament for the bygone days at the tailgate, those idealized Friday night lights and holy Sunday mornings. It was “Merry Go ’Round,” that potent, scorching indictment of small-town life, myths, and complacency, and she had insisted that this was exactly the way she wanted to introduce herself to country radio, even if it wasn’t a breezy anthem or polite ballad.
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Kacey, new enough to town that her name was still unknown to many in the audience (unless they’d paid the attention they should have to the songwriters on Miranda’s “Mama’s Broken Heart”), smoothed her dress down, grabbed her guitar, and made her way out to middle stage, where she glanced at the crowd-mostly men, mostly still lunching and ready to talk over a young woman with a guitar if they had to-and introduced her song at the Ryman for the first time. This is how CRS went, anyway, with the lines between professionalism and the party blurred into an amorphous smudge of a week-to the point where the entire event had become known to attendees as “Can’t Remember Shit.”įor now, though, in the daylight hours, it was still supposed to be about the music, the business. Not ideal, but it’s better than having to dog-and-pony in the crowded, sticky bars they’ll take to later, enduring unwanted advances from men who feel entitled to ogle their legs, steal a hug, or smell their hair, drunk on power and gratis tequila (there’s hardly a faster way to a radio guy’s heart, and playlist, than through a bunch of freebies, after all). Up in the stiff wooden pews the radio programmers, record executives, and DJs ate their boxed lunches as lanyards dangled around their necks-the performers had to play to the sound of crunched chips and sandwich chewing, hoping a particularly potent verse doesn’t get lost in the rustle of a cookie being unwrapped. And a coveted ticket, too: this is where the stars, like Eric Church, Keith Urban, and Carrie Underwood, can be found, making it the perfect early-afternoon chance for humblebrag social media posts that send outsiders drooling, sniffing that juicy steak of celebrity smoking on the fire. It’s not exactly glamorous, crawling from bed to the makeup chair to the stage before it’s even happy hour, but this pageantry was and is, as most things in Nashville are, accepted tradition. Her grandma and grandpa had driven in from Texas, extra puffs of hair spray and pomade applied, just for this: the annual Universal Records “Team UMG” lunchtime event during Country Radio Seminar, known as CRS, where artists new and old sing their songs to woo a crowd of radio programmers, hoping they’ll feel motivated enough to add their singles into rotation. It was around noon on a strangely humid February day in downtown Nashville-not the kind of hour when you want to be onstage, as the southern sun hits the Ryman Auditorium’s stained-glass windows, if you had your choice-and Kacey was set to make her debut at the storied venue, a place where so much of country music history has been born and blossomed. Chasteness, Soda Pop, and Show Tunes: The Lost Story of the Young Americans and the Choircore Movement