For a show that’s not afraid to go deep on the music industry, “Nashville” spends curiously little time dealing with the people that actually power it: the fans. But the cast are acutely aware of how much they owe to obsessive viewers of their delightfully ridiculous country music soap opera. The minute ABC announced that they were cancelling the show last month, a vocal social media campaign kicked into gear, eventually prompting CMT to pick “Nashville” up for a fifth season just a few weeks later. It made last week’s cast tour of the UK into a victory lap rather than a funeral procession. “It would have been brutal!” said Charles Esten (aka Deacon Claybourne) backstage at Bristol’s Colston Hall. “It would have been a goodbye tour to a fanbase that is just crazy for the show, so it would have been heartbreaking to know that that was it for them.”
Joining Esten on this short UK jaunt are Clare Bowen (Scarlett O’Connor), Chris Carmack (Will Lexington), and Sam Palladio (Gunnar Scott), who hails from the south west of England. The shows were beyond sold out, and it was the rare live music experience populated mostly by middle-aged women. I brought my mum, who’s not a big music fan, but loves “Nashville.” She declared the performers to be “excellent—better singers than normal singers,” which cut to the strangeness of the setup. It’s the adult “Hannah Montana,” with cast members performing songs from official soundtracks intermingled with their own material. Sometimes Esten would introduce his songs as “one Deacon wrote for Rayna—which isn’t saying much since he wrote ‘em all for Rayna,” while Palladio introduced Bowen on her first turn as “my better half, Scarlett O’Connor.”
The show’s gaudiness can make the emotional core of “Nashville” hard to articulate, but the concert’s sincere connections made being a grown woman going to see actors perform songs written for fictional scenarios feel much less dweeby. It was obvious that the performers, who sang solo and in various group formations, truly love one another. But it was also a riot, complete with torrid solos and swaggering guitar face-offs. The screaming was deafening throughout, but particularly when Esten appeared. (My mum was texting pictures of him to her friend, who returned frankly unprintable responses.) He was a shameless ladies’ man, shooing security away as he danced with women in the aisles, and winking for anyone pointing a camera at him.
The last two numbers offered meta commentary on the performers’ roles as actors and musicians in their own right. “On the highway, we don’t know where we’ll go,” they sang on the unashamedly cheesy penultimate song, possibly alluding to the show’s perpetually unstable existence and the arrival of new showrunners for season five. They closed with “A Life That’s Good,” a number that Esten called “the heart of the show,” crowding close over a shared microphone as they sang about the “family that always calls me home, four wheels together.” Being a pop fan is all about constructing fictions around the object of your affection. The only difference with “Nashville” is that someone else is writing the stories for you.
Before the show, the cast assembled in pairs to talk with Pitchfork about the blurred lines between themselves and their characters, how the show could be a Trojan horse for smuggling ideas into the mainstream, and what’s next for “Nashville.”
Sam Palladio and Chris Carmack
How far in advance did you know it was cancelled, and where were you when you found out it was coming back?
Sam Palladio: Basically the public knows everything, so it was kind of a crazy day. We found out we got cancelled, none of us seemed to have the communication come down from the people it should have come down from, so it was sort of announced to the press without us knowing. So the cancellation was announced, and I got a text from Eric Close, who plays mayor Teddy on the show, saying “I’m terribly sorry about the show being cancelled.” I had to actually google “Nashville cancelled” to find out that we’d been cancelled.
Chris Carmack: Then you got a text from me that just said, “Well fuck.” The pickup—I was playing CMA fest that day in Nashville, and I had played two gigs. The first one, everyone was saying, “Congratulations on the pickup!” And I was like, well it’s just a rumor right now, and they’re like, “No, it’s happened!” Then right before my second set, I see that my publicist had texted me two hours before. So the public knew before us.
You both have happy endings at the end of the last season. Scarlett and Gunnar have gone a long way together. Do you think their relationship will survive the scrutiny of being a successful band and couple? What road is left for them to run?
SP: It’s an interesting one—most of the romantic scenarios that you can think of have been ticked off. Dating, best friends, roommates, living together, breaking up, declaring love again, back and forth—
CC: Marriage proposals!
SP: I suppose this new season may find them settling into being happy, which would be good. Personally I want to see them make great music and be a success. Of course, there has to be drama there, but we have gone down a lot of those avenues. I’d also like to see Gunnar have a bit of the spotlight for a second, because he’s always been there for Scarlett. Gunnar’s such an ambitious guy, he makes some bad choices sometimes along the way, but I like what Autumn Chase is saying in season four: “You know Gunnar, you’ve got everything under your belt, believe in yourself a little more, you can be on your own if you need to…”
Was Autumn Chase actively evil? Or was she threatened by sharing the stage with a younger woman? It was a very menacing performance.
SP: [laughs] Very menacing! I think the young blood might have stirred her up a little bit. She had a bit of a soft spot for Gunnar—who doesn’t, Will Lexington has a soft spot for Gunnar. I hope we get to see a bit more of Alicia [Witt, who played Chase], though I’m not sure if she will be joining us. But certainly nobody liked her!
CC: Our show has a history of having actively evil people—
SP: Lamar Wyatt, Jeff Fordham…
Cynthia Davis!Are there really people like that on American TV? That was hate speech.
CC: I think it’s quite exaggerated. You have to create a very quick picture of somebody in order to tell a story on our show. But in terms of hardline right-wing people on television, there’s some people that make me cringe when I change the channel.
And your prospective president is probably worse than that.
CC: [long flustered exhale, shakes head, laughs] No comment!
That speech Will gives Cynthia must have been very emotional to act.
CC: It was. And it was an opportunity which we don’t get on the show very often to say something simple and small and say it with power, because a lot of times it’s high-drama and tears. But fortunately [show creator] Callie Khouri was directing this episode, and she has a great sense for what actually is powerful, and not going to a heightened place. Sometimes it’s about really simplifying and finding the truth in a circumstance.
You shook your head when I mentioned Donald Trump—
CC: I nearly had palpitations!
You are in this terrible, heightened period of hateful rhetoric in the US at the moment. With things like Will’s speech about acceptance, and having Kesha make a guest appearance, does the show feel at all like a Trojan horse where you can nudge some ideas into the mainstream?
CC: A little bit, yes and no—it could be a lovely opportunity to bring some important messages to viewers. At the same time, you get a lot of reaction from viewers, like, “This is ridiculous, this would never happen,” and you’re like, read the newspaper, it’s happening.
SP: For me, we should try and bring a little love and music into what’s looking like a pretty tough place at the moment.
Clare Bowen and Charles Esten
There’s so much great drama in the show, but it has a deep emotional core that’s quite hard to articulate. What is that, for you?
Clare Bowen: It’s Nashville, it’s a western, the desert is its own character. Without Nashville, the Grand Old Opry, the Ryman, the Bluebird—we could not do this show. It’s preserved the integrity of the city. It’s not just a television show, it’s the whole thing: It’s Buddy Miller [musical director], Callie Khouri [creator], Steve Buchanan from the Opry who is the founding father of this whole idea for a television show about Nashville, and then the residents of Nashville. And then real country music artists embracing us, having Vince Gill and Elton John come on, that’s absolutely amazing.
Charles Esten: It’s that idea of community in the face of adversity. The interesting thing that I’m finding is that [the live audiences] are finding that in the concert as well. They see the bond that we all have, and so the very thing that drew them to the TV show, it’s a very similar beast.
“Nashville” is about parenting and addiction, which both of your characters deal with very specifically. Are they things you have to prepare for to play them authentically?
CB: As an actor, I function from a place of compassion and empathy—you have to believe 100 percent what your character is doing, because otherwise it will look like it’s not real. So yes, I personally do a little research. I wrote Scarlett’s backstory. And thank god we have this collaborative atmosphere with our writers, because we know our characters by now, and we’ve guided them. Then the writer Deb Fordham wrote the part where Beverley went into a coma, and Scarlett and Deacon are having this horrible fight about her quality of life. Deb shared part of her story for that, so knowing that Deb is watching me be her when she was 18, and her being brought to tears, that’s something very delicate, and it’s an honor to do that.
I didn’t realize you made that contribution to the writing.
CB: Yeah, it’s unusual. Also I think Scarlett is the closest character to me I’ve ever played—she wasn’t at the beginning, but she became it. Because they asked me to write her backstory, I unwittingly wrote some things that I had not yet dealt with, so we’ve been on the journey together. There is a dark side to it—to my past, my childhood, to be able to come out of that stronger—so I’m acting from a place of compassion and kindness. That’s been a really wonderful thing to be able to do, because it’s me that walks out onto the Opry stage, and Scarlett’s a part of me so much.
You were working on a solo album, Clare. How’s it coming?
CB: I think most of it is written, I wrote another one today actually, with Brandon [Young, her fiance]. I'm gonna let other people decide what kind of album it is. It's one of the best pieces of advice T Bone [Burnett, the original musical director for “Nashville”] gave me when I was working with him early on. He was like, “You're an actor, you have been taught to be anything anybody wants you to be, and you can do anything, so you can do everything.” It didn't put me into a box with genre.
CE: That's a good solution. I've been 1000 different people, so suddenly an album is: Who are you? What do you wanna say? So for me, it makes me kinda go [puzzled look].
CB: That's why I've waited so long!
CE: Me too, exactly! Because I have a bunch of songs, and we hear each other's songs, and it's like, “Which of those songs are quintessentially me?” The answer is, none of them are. You're all of those things, you're none of those things.