MOC-194568 The Songstitcher

You’ve done it — you’ve finally done it! After all the saving, all those months of planning, and all the work put in, you done up and did it: you left home with nothing but a guitar case, a duffel bag, and a head full of songs ready to be crafted and fine-tuned into a new Nashville record. Opportunity awaits you in this lyrical, neon, and noisy city. While your new place is located on the top floor of The Songstitcher, a Broadway-area honky-tonk and recording studio that had seen better days, it had one attribute you couldn’t say no to: that legacy.

Each floor of The Songstitcher is designed to represent a stage in the creation of Nashville country music. From the rooftop down, you’ll find a place to reflect and gather inspiration, bounce off ideas with your like-minded artsy-fartsy folk, finalize the melody and cut a record, then play live to the crowd your hand-crafted chanson, whether to their pleasure or to their disdain.

I wanted to explore a few new subjects and building techniques with this M.O.C. For example, I include no stairs in The Songstitcher. Instead, your country music novice will have to take the elevator all the way to the third floor, and then up the wall ladder to get to that special, music-inspiring lawn chair on the roof. The Songstitcher also pays homage to the legacy of country music pioneer Kitty Wells (1919-2012) with a two-brick-thick mural wall. (This can be interchanged with Mural #1: Smokey Mountain Songbird if you’d rather sport Dolly Parton’s backwoods gaze.) There are plenty of other nods to Nashville’s history peppered here and there within The Songstitcher.

Country music, at its true core, is the music of the common people’s experiences. All of them: The longings and hopes of a people. The pain and aspirations of a people. The love and struggle of a people. They’re what keep a people alive, and therefore keep country music alive.

The banjo that came from Africa and the guitar from Spain, accompanied by the melodies of English and Scottish ballads, sang through the voices of Appalachian homesteaders and mountaineers is quite the peculiarity, wouldn’t you say? Then, we pepper in Western and Mexican instrumentals, Sue Brewer’s couch, Loretta Lynn’s The Pill, and boom: the spirit of a people.

Why, darlin’, you’re in a gal’dern-near perfect spot to compose the country hit! You’re following in the footsteps of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and many others contributing to the never-ending Great American Songbook.

You’re walking them same streets, playing them same honky-tonks, and even getting them same rejection letters the Greats got startin’ out.

Your anguishes and griefs as well as your tales of heartbreak and tribulation, fresh on your mind, are all floating around in your mind just waiting to be thoroughly contemplated on and begin metamorphosis into the butterfly of song. Get to notepad scratchin’ and happy building!