This is a picture of me on the night of the Country Music Awards, the first night we arrived in Nashville. We didn't go to the awards show but we hung out around music row which was such a cool experience. You can see there is a stage behind me, throughout the night artists came out and played a song for us. It was so crowded though, you could barely move through the streets!
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(Music Row Nashville, Tennessee. Source: Music Row)
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My mother and I are both very social people and on our flight to Nashville we made a friend named Inga! She is from Latvia but now lives in Tulsa. She works for Chevy so she was on a business trip to Nashville since Chevy is one of the CMA Festivals sponsors. We talked with her the entire flight and even met up with her a couple times in Nashville. One night we got to enjoy a delicious dinner in one of the restaurants in our hotel with Inga. We still keep in touch with her too!
We had to walk over this GINORMOUS bridge every night from Nissan Stadium (where the nightly concerts were- yes concerts every night, *woop woop*) to get to the other side where our hotel was. It was pretty comical walking across this bridge with thousands of other people all at once. Since it was hard for us to move very fast we honestly looked like zombies. Heres a photo from the bridge we would cross. Nashville has such a gorgeous skyline!
Here is my lovely mom and I (yes I know, I will be lucky if I age half as well as her!) on the night of the CMAs. Snapchat allowed me to put this cute little sticker thing on our picture!! We had a blast in Nashville for five days! We got to see so many amazing artists including Keith Urban, Brett Eldridge, Carrie Underwood (shoutout Checotah, Oklahoma) and Dierks Bentley (who WAVED to me!!), and many many more amazingly talented artists! I am hopeful to get an internship with CMT for the spring semester which will allow me more time in this amazing city! I highly recommend you visit Nashville at least once in your life, especially if you have a heart for country music like I do!
OH MY! How could I forget? I also scored a free backstage pass to Bonnaroo, another music festival just an hour from Nashville in Manchester, TN. I got to see Third Eye Blind and X-Ambassadors. But the best part was running into Adam DeVine from Pitch Perfect (Bumper) and other shows and movies including the new movie Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (where he plays alongside Zac Efron *drool*). He was SO incredibly nice and even told me it was nice to meet me, I was so honored. Haha, anyway- it was all around an amazing trip!!!
Wow, Madelyn, it made me so happy to read this post. Between high school and later, I lived in Nashville for seven years, and I have so many great memories. Living and working there you meet musicians, song writers, all kinds of creative people, and that just gives the place such an energy boost. I am glad you had such a fantastic adventure there, and I hope you will get to go back and enjoy even more of what Nashville offers: the Parthenon, Radnor Lake... so much great stuff to see and enjoy! :-)
ReplyDeleteWell, I think you're going to win the coolest introduction award. Outside of your internship plan, do you have any more awesome adventures planned with CMT? What about the I Heart Radio event? I think 90% of what I hear on the radio right now are their advertisements telling people to text in and win.
ReplyDeleteYou met so many people, and saw even more! You even made a great friend on the plane ride. I don't think I could pull that off. I'd be the guy with earbuds and a kindle. Between the two styles, yours definitely seems like the way to go.
I think the thing I'm most jealous of is seeing Dierks. I’ll just pretend him and I are on a first-name basis. I saw him at OKCFest a few years ago. It was an incredible night.
I remember putting 'What was I Thinking,' on almost every playlist I had. He's had some good summer hits too. This summer I'm digging 'Somewhere on a Beach,' and 'Drunk on a Plane,' was awesome a couple years ago. I bet the stewardess is the girl at the beach!
I've got a story that's vaguely related to all this. I had some friends that were actually working with CMT here in OKC. They went through casting the hosts, finding a venue, and getting everything ready to go. The show was about red dirt music, and they were going to work with the Wormy Dog. Unfortunately, CMT decided there wasn't a big enough audience for it. Sad face.
Side-Note: the wormy dog is a great place to go for red dirt music. Since you like country music, I bet you’d love it there. Eli Young even played there before they hit it big.
I had no idea Adam DeVine was in Pitch Perfect. It's *almost* enough to make me watch it. I'm kidding. I haven't seen it, but I'm not against it. After all, I'm a guy who has zero shame in admitting that I loved Mean Girls and The DUFF.
Your introduction was awesome, and you did a great job taking the reader on the adventure with you!